Related papers: Profiling Developers Through the Lens of Technical…

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) refers to instances where developers knowingly introduce suboptimal solutions into code and document them, often through textual artifacts. This paper provides a comprehensive state-of-practice report on…

A vigorous and growing set of technical debt analysis tools have been developed in recent years -- both research tools and industrial products -- such as Structure 101, SonarQube, and DV8. Each of these tools identifies problematic files…

Technical Debt management decisions always imply a trade-off among outcomes at different points in time. In such intertemporal choices, distant outcomes are often valued lower than close ones, a phenomenon known as temporal discounting.…

Context: Modern code review is a widely employed technique in both industrial and open-source projects, serving to enhance software quality, share knowledge, and ensure compliance with coding standards and guidelines. While code review is…

We aim to explore how developers document their refactoring activities during the software life cycle. We call such activity Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR), which indicates developers' documentation of their refactoring activities. SAR is…

NonTechnical Debt (NTD) is a common challenge in agile software development, manifesting in four critical forms, Process Debt, Social Debt, People Debt, Organizational debt. NODLA project is a collaboration between Karlstad University and…

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) refers to comments in which developers explicitly acknowledge code issues, workarounds, or suboptimal solutions. SATD is known to significantly increase software maintenance effort. While extensive…

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) encompasses a wide array of sub-optimal design and implementation choices reported in software artefacts (e.g., code comments and commit messages) by developers themselves. Such reports have been central…

Upon evolving their software, organizations and individual developers have to spend a substantial effort to pay back technical debt, i.e., the fact that software is released in a shape not as good as it should be, e.g., in terms of…

Generative AI is accelerating software development, but may quietly shift where the most significant risks lie. As AI generates code faster than teams can understand it, two under appreciated forms of debt accumulate: cognitive debt, the…

This paper presents a case study analyzing Hibernate ecosystem software projects to investigate and demonstrate Code Debt behavior in relation to severity and rework time. The case study carried out revealed that the Code Debt with severity…

Background: Technical Debt (TD) describes suboptimal software development practices with long-term consequences, such as defects and vulnerabilities. Deadlines are a leading cause of the emergence of TD in software systems. While multiple…

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…

Software design smells are design attributes which violate the fundamental design principles. Design smells are a key cause of design debt. Although the activities of design smell identification and measurement are predominantly considered…

Software and systems traceability is essential for downstream tasks such as data-driven software analysis and intelligent tool development. However, despite the increasing attention to mining and understanding technical debt in software…

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

Context: Advances in technical debt research demonstrate the benefits of applying the financial debt metaphor to support decision-making in software development activities. Although decision-making during requirements engineering has…

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a metaphorical concept to describe the self-documented addition of technical debt to a software project in the form of source code comments. SATD can linger in projects and degrade source-code quality,…

The adoption of Machine and Deep Learning (ML/DL) technologies introduces maintenance challenges, leading to Technical Debt (TD). Algorithm Debt (AD) is a TD type that impacts the performance and scalability of ML/DL systems. A review of 42…