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A key aspect of technical debt (TD) management is the ability to measure the amount of principal accumulated in a system. The current literature contains an array of approaches to estimate TD principal, however, only a few of them focus…

JavaScript has been consistently among the most popular programming languages in the past decade. However, its dynamic, weakly-typed, and asynchronous nature can make it challenging to write maintainable code for developers without in-depth…

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…

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…

Context. Code smells, which are recurring anomalies in design or style, have been extensively researched in professional code. However, their significance in block-based projects created by novices is still largely unknown. Block-based…

Potential benefits such as agile service delivery have led many companies to deliver their business capabilities through microservices. Bad smells are however always around the corner, as witnessed by the considerable body of literature…

As software proliferates across domains, its aggregate energy footprint has become a major concern. To reduce software's growing environmental footprint, developers need to identify and refactor energy smells: source code implementations,…

Code smells are widely used indicators of poor code quality, revealing structural problems and areas where improvement can be made. Although extensively studied in object-oriented languages, functional programming languages remain…

The growth of Python adoption across diverse domains has led to increasingly complex codebases, presenting challenges in maintaining code quality. While numerous tools attempt to address these challenges, they often fall short in providing…

Traditionally, energy efficiency research has focused on reducing energy consumption at the hardware level and, more recently, in the design and coding phases of the software development life cycle. However, software testing's impact on…

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…

Developers need to make a constant effort to improve the quality of their code if they want to stay productive. Tools that highlight code locations that could benefit from refactoring are thus highly desirable. The most common name for such…

Logging plays a central role in ensuring reproducibility, observability, and reliability in machine learning (ML) systems. While logging is generally considered a good engineering practice, poorly designed logging can negatively affect…

A code smell is a surface indicator of an inherent problem in the system, most often due to deviation from standard coding practices on the developers part during the development phase. Studies observe that code smells made the code more…

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

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…

Dependency management in modern software development poses many challenges for developers who wish to stay up to date with the latest features and fixes whilst ensuring backwards compatibility. Project maintainers have opted for varied, and…

With the continuous growth of the internet market, games are becoming more and more popular worldwide. However, increased market competition for game demands developers to write more efficient games in terms of performance, security, and…

Code smells are symptoms of potential code quality problems that may affect software maintainability, thus increasing development costs and impacting software reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for…

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…