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Background: As Infrastructure as Code (IaC) becomes standard practice, ensuring the reliability of IaC scripts is essential. Defect taxonomies are valuable tools for this, offering a common language for issues and enabling systematic…

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,…

The Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in code-related tasks. However, most research focuses on improving the output quality of LLMs (e.g., correctness), and less attention has been paid to the LLM input (e.g.,…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated their adoption in software engineering contexts. However, concerns persist about the structural quality of the code they produce. In particular, LLMs often replicate poor…

Code smells indicate software design problems that harm software quality. Data-intensive systems that frequently access databases often suffer from SQL code smells besides the traditional smells. While there have been extensive studies on…

Cloud computing has become popular thanks to the widespread use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, allowing the community to conveniently manage and configure cloud infrastructure using scripts. However, the scripting process itself…

Nowadays, modern applications are developed using components written in different programming languages. These systems introduce several advantages. However, as the number of languages increases, so does the challenges related to the…

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,…

A smell in software source code denotes an indication of suboptimal design and implementation decisions, potentially hindering the code understanding and, in turn, raising the likelihood of being prone to changes and faults. Identifying…

This study presents a quantitative evaluation of the code quality and security of five prominent Large Language Models (LLMs): Claude Sonnet 4, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Llama 3.2 90B, and OpenCoder 8B. While prior research has assessed…

Using open-source dependencies is essential in modern software development. However, this practice implies significant trust in third-party code, while there is little support for developers to assess this trust. As a consequence, attacks…

Test smells are known as bad development practices that reflect poor design and implementation choices in software tests. Over the last decade, test smells were heavily studied to measure their prevalence and impacts on test…

Code smells and software vulnerabilities both increase maintenance cost, yet they are often handled by separate tools that miss structural context and produce noisy warnings. This paper presents The Code Whisperer, a hybrid framework that…

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…

Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…

As the development of Solidity contracts on Ethereum, more developers are reusing them on other compatible blockchains. However, developers may overlook the differences between the designs of the blockchain system, such as the Gas Mechanism…

High data quality is fundamental for today's AI-based systems. However, although data quality has been an object of research for decades, there is a clear lack of research on potential data quality issues (e.g., ambiguous, extraneous…

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools have transformed the way IT infrastructure is automated and managed, but their growing adoption has also exposed numerous challenges for practitioners. In this paper, we investigate these challenges…

Context: Securing microservice-based applications is crucial, as many IT companies are delivering their businesses through microservices. If security smells affect microservice-based applications, they can possibly suffer from security…

Test smells, similar to code smells, can negatively impact both the test code and the production code being tested. Despite extensive research on test smells in languages like Java, Scala, and Python, automated tools for detecting test…