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Secure by Design has become the mainstream development approach ensuring that software systems are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. Architectural security controls need to be carefully monitored over the software development life cycle to…

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…

Code smell is a great challenge in software refactoring, which indicates latent design or implementation flaws that may degrade the software maintainability and evolution. Over the past of decades, the research on code smell has received…

Machine learning (ML) codebases face unprecedented challenges in maintaining code quality and sustainability as their complexity grows exponentially. While traditional code smell detection tools exist, they fail to address ML-specific…

Similarly to production code, code smells also occur in test code, where they are called test smells. Test smells have a detrimental effect not only on test code but also on the production code that is being tested. To date, the majority of…

Cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) have gained popularity due to their low cost and elasticity. However, like other software, SaaS applications suffer from code smells, which can drastically affect functionality and resource usage.…

As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These…

Nowadays, the correct use of cryptography libraries is essential to ensure the necessary information security in different kinds of applications. A common practice in software development is the use of static application security testing…

Measuring and evaluating source code similarity is a fundamental software engineering activity that embraces a broad range of applications, including but not limited to code recommendation, duplicate code, plagiarism, malware, and smell…

Android apps cooperate through message passing via intents. However, when apps do not have identical sets of privileges inter-app communication (IAC) can accidentally or maliciously be misused, e.g., to leak sensitive information contrary…

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…

Modern software systems heavily rely on third-party dependencies, making software supply chain security a critical concern. We introduce the concept of software supply chain smells as structural indicators that signal potential security…

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…

Context:Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the practice to automatically configure system dependencies and to provision local and remote instances. Practitioners consider IaC as a fundamental pillar to implement DevOps practices, which helps…

Dependencies between modules can trigger ripple effects when changes are made, making maintenance complex and costly, so minimizing these dependencies is crucial. Consequently, understanding what drives dependencies is important. One…

Background. Software quality assurance is essential during software development and maintenance. Static Analysis Tools (SAT) are widely used for assessing code quality. Architectural smells are becoming more daunting to address and evaluate…

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.…

Mobile apps often embed authentication secrets, such as API keys, tokens, and client IDs, to integrate with cloud services. However, developers often hardcode these credentials into Android apps, exposing them to extraction through reverse…

Recent trends in the software development practices (Agile, DevOps, CI) have shortened the development life-cycle causing the need for efficient security-by-design approaches. In this context, software architectures are analyzed for…

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…