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Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) facilitate rapid software delivery, making fast feedback and minimal downtime essential. While caching has been shown to be an effective technique for tackling pipeline performance and…

As businesses increasingly adopt cloud technologies, they also need to be aware of new security challenges, such as server-side script attacks, to ensure the integrity of their systems and data. These scripts can steal data, compromise…

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly integrate native code interpreters, they enable powerful real-time execution capabilities, substantially expanding their utility. However, such integrations introduce potential system-level…

Security code review is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process typically requiring integration with automated security defect detection tools. However, existing security analysis tools struggle with poor generalization, high false…

Software design smells are design attributes which violate the fundamental design principles. Design smells are a key cause of design debt. Although the activities of design smell identification and measurement are predominantly considered…

Early identification of security issues in software development is vital to minimize their unanticipated impacts. Code review is a widely used manual analysis method that aims to uncover security issues along with other coding issues in…

Inter-Component Communication (ICC) is a key mechanism in Android. It enables developers to compose rich functionalities and explore reuse within and across apps. Unfortunately, as reported by a large body of literature, ICC is rather…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained massive popularity in recent years and are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes. However, poorly integrating them in source code may undermine software system quality.…

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: 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…

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly become a de facto standard for connecting LLM-based agents with external tools via reusable MCP servers. In practice, however, server selection and onboarding rely heavily on free-text tool…

Test smells are defined as sub-optimal design choices developers make when implementing test cases. Hence, similar to code smells, the research community has produced numerous test smell detection tools to investigate the impact of test…

Mobile apps have become essential of our daily lives, making code quality a critical concern for developers. Behavioural code smells are characteristics in the source code that induce inappropriate code behaviour during execution, which…

Context: Logging is an important part of modern software projects; logs are used in several tasks such as debugging and testing. Due to the complex nature of logging, it remains a difficult task with several pitfalls that could have serious…

Context: Code smells (CS) tend to compromise software quality and also demand more effort by developers to maintain and evolve the application throughout its life-cycle. They have long been catalogued with corresponding mitigating solutions…

Static security analysis is a widely used technique for detecting software vulnerabilities across a wide range of weaknesses, application domains, and programming languages. While prior work surveyed static analyzes for specific weaknesses…

Code smells as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Many times they are the result of so called technical debt. Our study showed that the interest in code smells research is increasing. However, most of the publications are…

Context. The adoption of Machine Learning (ML)--enabled systems is steadily increasing. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of ML-specific quality assurance approaches, possibly because of the limited knowledge of how quality-related concerns…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

Background. Architectural smells and code smells are symptoms of bad code or design that can cause different quality problems, such as faults, technical debt, or difficulties with maintenance and evolution. Some studies show that code…