Related papers: Code Smells and Refactoring: A Tertiary Systematic…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in automating software engineering tasks, particularly in code generation. However, current evaluation benchmarks, which primarily focus on accuracy, fall short in assessing the…

We are entering a hybrid era in which human developers and AI coding agents work in the same codebases. While industry practice has long optimized code for human comprehension, it is increasingly important to ensure that LLMs with different…

Code reuse is a widespread practice across software development projects, suggesting an inherent trust in the reused code. Yet, there is a lack of a fundamental understanding of developers' trust and how various factors mold their…

Context: In the realm of software development, maintaining high software quality is a persistent challenge. However, this challenge is often impeded by the lack of comprehensive understanding of how specific code modifications influence…

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,…

Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the…

Code smells are seen as major source of technical debt and, as such, should be detected and removed. However, researchers argue that the subjectiveness of the code smells detection process is a major hindrance to mitigate the problem of…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch have become increasingly popular as introductory languages for novices. These languages are intended to be used with a "tinkering" approach which allows learners and teachers to quickly…

Environmental factors determine the smells we perceive, but societal factors factors shape the importance, sentiment and biases we give to them. Descriptions of smells in text, or as we call them `smell experiences', offer a window into…

Code smells indicate the potential problems of software quality so that developers can identify refactoring opportunities by detecting code smells. State-of-the-art approaches leverage heuristics, machine learning, and deep learning to…

Various techniques have been proposed to leverage the capabilities of code language models (CLMs) for SE tasks. While these techniques typically evaluate their effectiveness using publicly available datasets, the evaluation can be subject…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch enable children to be creative while learning to program. Even though the block-based approach simplifies the creation of programs, learning to program can nevertheless be challenging.…

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs.…

The reproduction and replication of research results has become a major issue for a number of scientific disciplines. In computer science and related computational disciplines such as systems biology, the challenges closely revolve around…

Qualitative data analysis provides insight into the underlying perceptions and experiences within unstructured data. However, the time-consuming nature of the coding process, especially for larger datasets, calls for innovative approaches,…

Detecting refactorings in commit history is essential to improve the comprehension of code changes in code reviews and to provide valuable information for empirical studies on software evolution. Several techniques have been proposed to…

Context: Software specifications are usually written in natural language and may suffer from imprecision, ambiguity, and other quality issues, called thereafter, requirement smells. Requirement smells can hinder the development of a project…

The context of this work is specification, detection and ultimately removal of detectable harmful patterns in source code that are associated with defects in design and implementation of software. In particular, we investigate five code…

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…

Architectural decay imposes real costs in terms of developer effort, system correctness, and performance. Over time, those problems are likely to be revealed as explicit implementation issues (defects, feature changes, etc.). Recent…