Related papers: On the diversity and frequency of code related to …

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

In this work, we developed an algorithm for detecting code quality issues in the templates of online programming tasks, validated it, and conducted an empirical study on the dataset of student solutions. The algorithm consists of analyzing…

With the rapid increasing of software project size and maintenance cost, adherence to coding standards especially by managing identifier naming, is attracting a pressing concern from both computer science educators and software managers.…

Automated tests play an important role in software evolution because they can rapidly detect faults introduced during changes. In practice, code-coverage metrics are often used as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites with…

Contracts are a form of lightweight formal specification embedded in the program text. Being executable parts of the code, they encourage programmers to devote proper attention to specifications, and help maintain consistency between…

Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…

Worked examples (solutions to typical programming problems presented as a source code in a certain language and are used to explain the topics from a programming class) are among the most popular types of learning content in programming…

Scientific computation is a discipline that combines numerical analysis, physical understanding, algorithm development, and structured programming. Several yottacycles per year on the world's largest computers are spent simulating problems…

Code readability and software complexity are important software quality metrics that impact other software metrics such as maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability. This paper presents an empirical study of the…

The software development community has been using code quality metrics for the last five decades. Despite their wide adoption, code quality metrics have attracted a fair share of criticism. In this paper, first, we carry out a qualitative…

The hard coding of input data or constants into spreadsheet formulas is widely recognised as poor spreadsheet model design. However, the importance of avoiding such practice appears to be underestimated perhaps in light of the lack of…

Even though numerous researchers require stable datasets along with source code and basic metrics calculated on them, neither GitHub nor any other code hosting platform provides such a resource. Consequently, each researcher must download…

One of the first steps to perform most of the software maintenance activities, such as updating features or fixing bugs, is to have a relatively good understanding of the program's source code which is often written by other developers. A…

Context: Software Engineering research makes use of collections of software artifacts (corpora) to derive empirical evidence from. Goal: To improve quality and reproducibility of research, we need to understand the characteristics of used…

Existing software tools enable characterizing and measuring the amount of technical debt at selective granularity levels. In this paper we aim to study the evolution and characteristics of technical debt in open-source software. We carry…

Unit tests are widely used to check source code quality, but they can be too coarse-grained or ill-suited for testing individual program statements. We introduce inline tests to make it easier to check for faults in statements. We motivate…

We introduce program splicing, a programming methodology that aims to automate the commonly used workflow of copying, pasting, and modifying code available online. Here, the programmer starts by writing a "draft" that mixes unfinished code,…

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…

It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code written in a…