Related papers: The Effect of Noise on Sofware Engineers' Performa…
Robust loss functions are designed to combat the adverse impacts of label noise, whose robustness is typically supported by theoretical bounds agnostic to the training dynamics. However, these bounds may fail to characterize the empirical…
During both pretraining and fine-tuning, Large Language Models (\textbf{LLMs}) are trained on trillions of tokens of text of widely varying quality. Both phases of training typically involve heuristically filtering out ``low-quality'' or…
Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…
Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…
Noise is source of ambiguity for fuzzy systems. Although being an important aspect, the effects of noise in fuzzy modeling have been little investigated. This paper presents a set of tests using three well-known fuzzy modeling algorithms.…
Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…
Developers interrupting their participation in a project might slowly forget critical information about the code, such as its intended purpose, structure, the impact of external dependencies, and the approach used for implementation.…
What is the impact of software engineering research on current practices in industry? In this paper, I report on my direct experience as a PhD/post-doc working in software engineering research projects, and then spending the following five…
High-quality software products rely on both well-written source code and timely detection and thorough reporting of bugs. However, some programmers view bug reports as negative assessments of their work, leading them to withhold reporting…
Accurately predicting faulty software units helps practitioners target faulty units and prioritize their efforts to maintain software quality. Prior studies use machine-learning models to detect faulty software code. We revisit past studies…
Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are commonly used in universities for assessing teaching quality. However, previous literature shows that in software engineering students tend to rate certain topics higher than others: In particular…
Software Interfaces are meant to describe contracts governing interactions between logic modules. Interfaces, if well designed, significantly reduce software complexity and ease maintainability . However, as software evolves, the…
Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up…
The phenomenon of architecture erosion can negatively impact the maintenance and evolution of software systems, and manifest in a variety of symptoms during software development. While erosion is often considered rather late, its symptoms…
When Computer Science (CS) students try to use or extend open-source software (OSS) projects, they often encounter the common challenge of OSS failing to build on their local machines. Even though OSS often provides ready-to-build packages,…
Noise is a fundamental problem in learning theory with huge effects in the application of Machine Learning (ML) methods, due to real world data tendency to be noisy. Additionally, introduction of malicious noise can make ML methods fail…
Context and Motivation: Software requirements are affected by the knowledge and confidence of software engineers. Analyzing the interrelated impact of these factors is difficult because of the challenges of assessing knowledge and…
Recently, workforce shortage has become a popular issue in information technology (IT). One solution to increasing the workforce supply is to increase the number of female IT professionals. This is because there is gender imbalance in…
Dyslexia is a common learning disorder that primarily impairs an individual's reading and writing abilities. In adults, dyslexia can affect both professional and personal lives, often leading to mental challenges and difficulties acquiring…
This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…