Related papers: Code smells detection and visualization: A systema…

Software visualization seeks to represent software artifacts graphical-ly in two or three dimensions, with the goal of enhancing comprehension, anal-ysis, maintenance, and evolution of the source code. In this context, visualiza-tions…

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…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

As code search permeates most activities in software development,code-to-code search has emerged to support using code as a query and retrieving similar code in the search results. Applications include duplicate code detection for…

The immense amounts of source code provide ample challenges and opportunities during software development. To handle the size of code bases, developers commonly search for code, e.g., when trying to find where a particular feature is…

Context: Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. Numerous empirical studies investigating the impact of refactoring activities on software quality have been conducted over the last two decades.…

(Source) code search is widely concerned by software engineering researchers because it can improve the productivity and quality of software development. Given a functionality requirement usually described in a natural language sentence, a…

Reusing code can produce duplicate or near-duplicate code clones in code repositories. Current code clone detection techniques, like Program Dependence Graphs, rely on code structure and their dependencies to detect clones. These techniques…

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…

Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…

Despite the continuous efforts in improving both the effectiveness and efficiency of code search, two issues remained unsolved. First, programming languages have inherent strong structural linkages, and feature mining of code as text form…

Automated deployment and management of Cloud applications relies on descriptions of their deployment topologies, often referred to as Infrastructure Code. As the complexity of applications and their deployment models increases, developers…

Large language models (LLMs) have been massively applied to many tasks, often surpassing state-of-the-art approaches. While their effectiveness in code generation has been extensively studied (e.g., AlphaCode), their potential for code…

Code review is a crucial practice in software development. As code review nowadays is lightweight, various issues can be identified, and sometimes, they can be trivial. Research has investigated automated approaches to classify review…

Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…

Gender stereotypes in introductory programming courses often go unnoticed, yet they can negatively influence young learners' interest and learning, particularly under-represented groups such as girls. Popular tutorials on block-based…

Automated code smell detection faces persistent challenges due to the subjectivity of heuristic rules and the limited performance of traditional ML/DL models. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative, their adoption…

Test smells indicate poor development practices in test code, reducing maintainability and reliability. While developers often struggle to prevent or refactor these issues, existing tools focus primarily on detection rather than automated…

Software testing is still a manual process in many industries, despite the recent improvements in automated testing techniques. As a result, test cases are often specified in natural language by different employees and many redundant test…