Related papers: Towards Anticipation of Architectural Smells using…

Enterprise Architecture Debt (EA Debt) arises from suboptimal design decisions and misaligned components that can degrade an organization's IT landscape over time. Early indicators, Enterprise Architecture Smells (EA Smells), are currently…

Simulation modelling systems are routinely used to test or understand real-world scenarios in a controlled setting. They have found numerous applications in scientific research, engineering, and industrial operations. Due to their complex…

Context: Test smells are symptoms of sub-optimal design choices adopted when developing test cases. Previous studies have proved their harmfulness for test code maintainability and effectiveness. Therefore, researchers have been proposing…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes, due to their versatility, flexibility, and ability to simulate human reasoning to some extent. However, poor integration of LLM inference…

Code smells are indicators of potential design flaws in source code and do not appear alone but in combination with other smells, creating complex interactions. While existing literature classifies these smell interactions into collocated,…

Eradication of code smells is often pointed out as a way to improve readability, extensibility and design in existing software. However, code smell detection in large systems remains time consuming and error-prone, partly due to the…

Technical debt has become a common metaphor for the accumulation of software design and implementation choices that seek fast initial gains but that are under par and counterproductive in the long run. However, as a metaphor, technical debt…

Bad requirements quality can cause expensive consequences during the software development lifecycle, especially if iterations are long and feedback comes late. %-- the faster a problem is found, the cheaper it is to fix. This makes explicit…

Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running…

Architectural code smells erode software maintainability and are costly to repair manually, yet unlike localized bugs, they require cross-module reasoning about design intent that challenges both developers and automated tools. While large…

Understanding what drives code instability is essential for effective software maintenance, as unstable classes require larger or more frequent edits and increase the risk of unintended side effects. Although code smells are widely believed…

Spreadsheets are commonly used in organizations as a programming tool for business-related calculations and decision making. Since faults in spreadsheets can have severe business impacts, a number of approaches from general software…

Code smells are characteristics of the software that indicates a code or design problem which can make software hard to understand, evolve, and maintain. The code smell detection tools proposed in the literature produce different results,…

CONTEXT: There has been a rapid growth in the use of data analytics to underpin evidence-based software engineering. However the combination of complex techniques, diverse reporting standards and poorly understood underlying phenomena are…

Code samples play a pivotal role in open-source ecosystems (OSSECO), serving as lightweight artifacts that support knowledge transfer, onboarding, and framework adoption. Despite their instructional relevance, these samples are often…

Fault-proneness is an indication of programming errors that decreases software quality and maintainability. On the contrary, code smell is a symptom of potential design problems which has impact on fault-proneness. In the literature,…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are pervasive in the current computer science landscape. Yet, there still exists a lack of software engineering experience and best practices in this field. One such best practice,…

Use case modeling is very popular to represent the functionality of the system to be developed, and it consists of two parts: use case diagram and use case description. Use case descriptions are written in structured natural language (NL),…

While a substantial body of prior research has investigated the form and nature of production code, comparatively little attention has examined characteristics of test code, and, in particular, test smells in that code. In this paper, we…

Bad smells have been defined to describe potential problems in code, possibly pointing out refactoring opportunities. Several empirical studies have highlighted that smells have a negative impact on comprehension and maintainability.…