Related papers: Examining the Relationship of Code and Architectur…
Technical debt occurs in many different forms across software artifacts. One such form is connected to software architectures where debt emerges in the form of structural anti-patterns across architecture elements, namely, architecture…
Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices, which might hinder comprehension, increase code complexity and fault-proneness and decrease maintainability of software systems. The aim of our study was to perform a…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated their adoption in software engineering contexts. However, concerns persist about the structural quality of the code they produce. In particular, LLMs often replicate poor…
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…
Background. Software quality assurance is essential during software development and maintenance. Static Analysis Tools (SAT) are widely used for assessing code quality. Architectural smells are becoming more daunting to address and evaluate…
As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These…
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…
Context: Logging is an important part of modern software projects; logs are used in several tasks such as debugging and testing. Due to the complex nature of logging, it remains a difficult task with several pitfalls that could have serious…
Traditionally, energy efficiency research has focused on reducing energy consumption at the hardware level and, more recently, in the design and coding phases of the software development life cycle. However, software testing's impact on…
Nowadays, modern applications are developed using components written in different programming languages. These systems introduce several advantages. However, as the number of languages increases, so does the challenges related to the…
Context: Security smells are recurring coding patterns that are indicative of security weakness, and require further inspection. As infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts, such as Ansible and Chef scripts, are used to provision cloud-based…
A code smell is a surface indicator of an inherent problem in the system, most often due to deviation from standard coding practices on the developers part during the development phase. Studies observe that code smells made the code more…
CONTEXT: There has been a rapid growth in the use of data analytics to underpin evidence-based software engineering. However the combination of complex techniques, diverse reporting standards and poorly understood underlying phenomena are…
Background: Defect prediction in software can be highly beneficial for development projects, when prediction is highly effective and defect-prone areas are predicted correctly. One of the key elements to gain effective software defect…
Code smells are indicators of potential design flaws in source code and do not appear alone but in combination with other smells, creating complex interactions. While existing literature classifies these smell interactions into collocated,…
Simulation modelling systems are routinely used to test or understand real-world scenarios in a controlled setting. They have found numerous applications in scientific research, engineering, and industrial operations. Due to their complex…
Understanding what drives code instability is essential for effective software maintenance, as unstable classes require larger or more frequent edits and increase the risk of unintended side effects. Although code smells are widely believed…
In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…
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…
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…