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Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…
Context: Over the last decade, software researchers and engineers have developed a vast body of methodologies and technologies in requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems. Although existing studies have explored various aspects of…
Analysing and improving productivity has been one of the main goals of software engineering research since its beginnings. A plethora of studies has been conducted on various factors that resulted in several models for analysis and…
Automated tests play an important role in software evolution because they can rapidly detect faults introduced during changes. In practice, code-coverage metrics are often used as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites with…
Well structured and readable source code is a pre-requisite for maintainable software and successful collaboration among developers. Static analysis enables the automated extraction of code complexity and readability metrics which can be…
Software vulnerabilities often persist or re-emerge even after being fixed, revealing the complex interplay between code evolution and socio-technical factors. While source code metrics provide useful indicators of vulnerabilities, software…
Recent advances in coding agents have shown remarkable progress in software issue resolution. In practice, real-world issues are typically bug fixes or feature requests in which human developers naturally incorporate refactoring as part of…
Background. Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, and are employed both in open-source and industrial contexts. One of the main goals of code reviews is to find defects in the code, allowing…
Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…
Refactorings are transformations to improve the code design without changing overall functionality and observable behavior. During the refactoring process of smelly test code, practitioners may struggle to identify refactoring candidates…
Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…
Modern software development methodologies include reuse of open source code. Reuse can be facilitated by architectural knowledge of the software, not necessarily provided in the documentation of open source software. The effort required to…
Layered architecture represents the software structure in the form of layers. Every element in the software is assigned to one of the layers such that the relationship amongst the elements is maintained. A set of design principles rules the…
Modular and well-written software is an ideal that programmers strive to achieve. However, real-world project constraints limit the amount of reusable and modular code that programmers can produce. Many techniques exist that refactor code…
Creating functions is at the center of writing computer programs. But there has been little empirical research on how this is done and what are the considerations that developers use. We design an experiment in which we can compare the…
Programming languages and platforms improve over time, sometimes resulting in new language features that offer many benefits. However, despite these benefits, developers may not always be willing to adopt them in their projects for various…
The idea of automatizing the assessment of objectoriented design is not new. Different approaches define and apply their own quality models, which are composed of single metrics or combinations thereof, to operationalize software design.…
Architecture optimization is the process of automatically generating design options, typically to enhance software's quantifiable quality attributes, such as performance and reliability. Multi-objective optimization approaches have been…
Code readability is fundamental to software quality and maintainability. Poor readability extends development time, increases bug-inducing risks, and contributes to technical debt. With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models, AI…
Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread popularity and have steadily improved over time, enabling software developers to use them for various code-related tasks. One common task is code refactoring, where the LLM suggests…