Related papers: A Catalogue of Game-Specific Software Nuggets

Software defects are a major threat to the reliability of computer systems. The literature shows that more than 30% of bug reports submitted in large software projects are misclassified (i.e., are feature requests, or mistakes made by the…

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Static analysis is one of the most widely adopted techniques to find software bugs before code is put in production. Designing and implementing effective and efficient static analyses is difficult and requires high expertise, which results…

One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…

When teaching Programming and Software Engineering in Bachelor's Degree programs, the emphasis on creating functional software projects often overshadows the focus on software quality, a trend that aligns with ACM curricula recommendations.…

Understanding how software defects manifest and evolve in production environments is critical for improving reliability. While previous research has largely focused on pre-release defects, the nature of residual faults, i.e., those escaping…

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…

The aims of this paper are: 1) to identify "worst smells", i.e., bad smells that never have a good reason to exist, 2) to determine the frequency, change-proneness, and severity associated with worst smells, and 3) to identify the "worst…

Code smells are characteristics of the software that indicates a code or design problem which can make software hard to understand, evolve, and maintain. The code smell detection tools proposed in the literature produce different results,…

Architectural smells (AS) are notorious for their long-term impact on the Maintainability and Evolvability of software systems. The majority of research work has investigated this topic by mining software repositories of open source Java…

[Background] In large open-source software projects, development knowledge is often fragmented across multiple artefacts and contributors such that individual stakeholders are generally unaware of the full breadth of the product features.…

The npm (Node Package Manager) ecosystem is the most important package manager for JavaScript development with millions of users. Consequently, a plethora of earlier work investigated how vulnerability reporting, patch propagation, and in…

Logging is a significant programming practice. Due to the highly transactional nature of modern software applications, massive amount of logs are generated every day, which may overwhelm developers. Logging information overload can be…

Background. Technical debt (TD) has long been one of the key factors influencing the maintainability of software products. It represents technical compromises that sacrifice long-term software quality for potential short-term benefits.…

Software testing is a critical activity to ensure that software complies with its specification. However, current software testing activities tend not to be completely effective when applied in specific software domains in Virtual Reality…

The rapid adoption of AI coding agents for software development has raised important questions about the quality and maintainability of the code they produce. While prior studies have examined AI-generated source code, the impact of AI…

Microservice architecture has become a dominant architectural style in the service-oriented software industry. Poor practices in the design and development of microservices are called microservice bad smells. In microservice bad smells…

Angular is one of the most widely adopted frameworks for developing large-scale, dynamic web applications. As projects increase in scope and complexity, developers face growing challenges in managing architecture and maintaining clean,…

Data is a cornerstone of empirical software engineering (ESE) research and practice. Data underpin numerous process and project management activities, including the estimation of development effort and the prediction of the likely location…

Bug finding tools can find defects in software source code us- ing an automated static analysis. This automation may be able to reduce the time spent for other testing and review activities. For this we need to have a clear understanding of…