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

While a substantial body of prior research has investigated the form and nature of production code, comparatively little attention has examined characteristics of test code, and, in particular, test smells in that code. In this paper, we…

Quantum computing has gained significant attention due to its potential to solve computational problems beyond the capabilities of classical computers. With major corporations and academic institutions investing in quantum hardware and…

Plagiarism detection in programming education faces growing challenges due to increasingly sophisticated obfuscation techniques, particularly automated refactoring-based attacks. While code plagiarism detection systems used in education…

The code smell is a sign of design and development flaws in a software system that reduces the reusability and maintainability of the system. Refactoring is done as an ongoing practice to remove the code smell from the program code. Among…

Architectural code smells erode software maintainability and are costly to repair manually, yet unlike localized bugs, they require cross-module reasoning about design intent that challenges both developers and automated tools. While large…

Code smells are symptoms of potential code quality problems that may affect software maintainability, thus increasing development costs and impacting software reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for…

The estimation and improvement of quality attributes in software architectures is a challenging and time-consuming activity. On modern software applications, a model-based representation is crucial to face the complexity of such activity.…

Developers need to make a constant effort to improve the quality of their code if they want to stay productive. Tools that highlight code locations that could benefit from refactoring are thus highly desirable. The most common name for such…

Code smells are widely used indicators of poor code quality, revealing structural problems and areas where improvement can be made. Although extensively studied in object-oriented languages, functional programming languages remain…

The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…

Context: Code smells are considered symptoms of poor design, leading to future problems, such as reduced maintainability. Except for anecdotal cases (e. g. code dropout), a code smell survives until it gets explicitly refactored or removed.…

To remain useful for their users, software systems need to continuously enhance and extend their functionality. Nevertheless, in many object-oriented applications, features are not represented explicitly. The lack of modularization is known…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

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…

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…

Refactoring is a crucial technique for improving the efficiency and maintainability of software by restructuring its internal design while preserving its external behavior. While classical programs have benefited from various refactoring…

JavaScript has been consistently among the most popular programming languages in the past decade. However, its dynamic, weakly-typed, and asynchronous nature can make it challenging to write maintainable code for developers without in-depth…

Being able to duplicate published research results is an important process of conducting research whether to build upon these findings or to compare with them. This process is called "replicability" when using the original authors'…

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…

In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…