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Context: Software specifications are usually written in natural language and may suffer from imprecision, ambiguity, and other quality issues, called thereafter, requirement smells. Requirement smells can hinder the development of a project…

Code analysis is fundamental in Software Engineering, supporting debugging, optimization, and security assessment. Human developers approach it through syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. Traditional tools are…

The growth of Python adoption across diverse domains has led to increasingly complex codebases, presenting challenges in maintaining code quality. While numerous tools attempt to address these challenges, they often fall short in providing…

Test smells are defined as sub-optimal design choices developers make when implementing test cases. Hence, similar to code smells, the research community has produced numerous test smell detection tools to investigate the impact of test…

Context: A substantial amount of work has been done to detect smells in source code using metrics-based and heuristics-based methods. Machine learning methods have been recently applied to detect source code smells; however, the current…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

Background: Modern software systems are commonly built on the top of frameworks. To accelerate the learning process of features provided by frameworks, code samples are made available to assist developers. However, we know little about how…

Code smell is a great challenge in software refactoring, which indicates latent design or implementation flaws that may degrade the software maintainability and evolution. Over the past of decades, the research on code smell has received…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch enable children to be creative while learning to program. Even though the block-based approach simplifies the creation of programs, learning to program can nevertheless be challenging.…

There are often multiple ways to implement the same requirement in source code. Different implementation choices can result in code snippets that are similar, and have been defined in multiple ways: code clones, examples, simions and…

Technical debt has become a common metaphor for the accumulation of software design and implementation choices that seek fast initial gains but that are under par and counterproductive in the long run. However, as a metaphor, technical debt…

JavaScript (JS) is one of the most popular programming languages, and widely used for web apps and even backend development. Due to its dynamic nature, however, JS applications often have a reputation for poor software quality. As a…

Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…

Code smells indicate the potential problems of software quality so that developers can identify refactoring opportunities by detecting code smells. State-of-the-art approaches leverage heuristics, machine learning, and deep learning to…

Much of the existing ML research focuses on model performance metrics, leaving limited attention to the long-term sustainability and resource efficiency of ML applications. While high performance is essential, ensuring efficient resource…

The learning and usage of an API is supported by official documentation. Like source code, API documentation is itself a software product. Several research results show that bad design in API documentation can make the reuse of API features…

Flaky tests (tests with non-deterministic outcomes) can be problematic for testing efficiency and software reliability. Flaky tests in test suites can also significantly delay software releases. There have been several studies that attempt…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in automating software engineering tasks, particularly in code generation. However, current evaluation benchmarks, which primarily focus on accuracy, fall short in assessing the…

Context: Securing microservice-based applications is crucial, as many IT companies are delivering their businesses through microservices. If security smells affect microservice-based applications, they can possibly suffer from security…

Using open-source dependencies is essential in modern software development. However, this practice implies significant trust in third-party code, while there is little support for developers to assess this trust. As a consequence, attacks…