Related papers: The Impact of Developer Experience in Using Java C…

Despite being an old language feature, Java exception handling code is one of the least understood parts of many systems. Several studies have analyzed the characteristics of exception handling code, trying to identify common practices or…

Tools focused on cryptographic API misuse often detect the most basic expressions of the vulnerable use, and are unable to detect non-trivial variants. The question of whether tools should be designed to detect such variants can only be…

Although writing code seems trivial at times, problems arise when humans misinterpret what the code actually does. One of the potential causes are "atoms of confusion", the smallest possible patterns of misinterpretable source code.…

Advances in quantum computing increasingly threaten the security and privacy of data protected by current cryptosystems, particularly those relying on public-key cryptography. In response, the international cybersecurity community has…

Version control systems for source code, such as Git, are key tools in modern software development environments. Many developers use online services, such as GitHub or GitLab, for collaborative software development. While software projects…

Previous studies have shown that developers regularly seek advice on online forums to resolve their cryptography issues. We investigated whether users who are active in cryptography discussions also use cryptography in practice. We…

Code readability and software complexity are important software quality metrics that impact other software metrics such as maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability. This paper presents an empirical study of the…

Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for better…

Since the introduction of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), software developers increasingly have to make privacy-related decisions during system design and…

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

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…

Modern software development requires a large investment in learning application programming interfaces (APIs). Recent research found that the learning materials themselves are often inadequate: developers struggle to find answers beyond…

Software applications integrate more and more open-source software (OSS) to benefit from code reuse. As a drawback, each vulnerability discovered in bundled OSS potentially affects the application. Upon the disclosure of every new…

Typical users are known to use and reuse weak passwords. Yet, as cybersecurity concerns continue to rise, understanding the password practices of software developers becomes increasingly important. In this work, we examine developers'…

AI-assisted development tools promise productivity gains and improved code quality, yet their adoption among developers remains inconsistent. Prior research suggests that professional expertise influences technology adoption, but its role…

Software testing is one of the very important Quality Assurance (QA) components. A lot of researchers deal with the testing process in terms of tester motivation and how tests should or should not be written. However, it is not known from…

Software reliability is critical in ensuring that the digital systems we depend on function correctly. In software development, increasing software reliability often involves testing. However, for complex and critical systems, developers…

We conduct a large-scale measurement of developers' insecure practices leading to mini-app to super-app authentication bypass, among which hard-coding developer secrets for such authentication is a major contributor. We also analyze the…

GitHub is a popular data repository for code examples. It is being continuously used to train several AI-based tools to automatically generate code. However, the effectiveness of such tools in correctly demonstrating the usage of…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…