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Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) often have usage constraints, such as restrictions on call order or call conditions. API misuses, i.e., violations of these constraints, may lead to software crashes, bugs, and vulnerabilities.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-03-14 Sven Amann , Hoan Anh Nguyen , Sarah Nadi , Tien N. Nguyen , Mira Mezini

Usually, programming languages have official documentation to guide developers with APIs, methods, and classes. However, researchers identified insufficient or inadequate documentation examples and flaws with the API's complex structure as…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-05 AmirHossein Naghshzan , Latifa Guerrouj , Olga Baysal

Various software features such as classes, methods, requirements, and tests often have similar functionality. This can lead to emergence of duplicates in their descriptive documentation. Uncontrolled duplicates created via copy/paste hinder…

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…

Modern software development requires developers to find and effectively utilize new APIs and their documentation, but documentation has many well-known issues. Despite this, developers eventually overcome these issues but have no way of…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Amber Horvath , Michael Xieyang Liu , River Hendriksen , Connor Shannon , Emma Paterson , Kazi Jawad , Andrew Macvean , Brad A. Myers

Context: Code reviews are essential for maintaining software quality, yet many human review comments suffer from issues such as redundancy, vagueness, or lack of constructiveness. These types of comments may slow down feedback and obscure…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Semih Çağlar , Şükrü Eren Gökırmak , Eray Tüzün

Code comments are the primary means to document implementation and facilitate program comprehension. Thus, their quality should be a primary concern to improve program maintenance. While much effort has been dedicated to detecting bad…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-26 Arianna Blasi , Nataliia Stulova , Alessandra Gorla , Oscar Nierstrasz

Context: Web APIs are one of the most used ways to expose application functionality on the Web, and their understandability is important for efficiently using the provided resources. While many API design rules exist, empirical evidence for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Justus Bogner , Sebastian Kotstein , Timo Pfaff

RESTful APIs are central in developing interoperable, modular, and maintainable software systems in enterprises today. Also, it is essential to support system evolution, service interoperability, and governance across organizational…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Edwin Sundberg , Thea Ekmark , Workneh Yilma Ayele

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 Engineering · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Gemma Catolino , Fabio Palomba , Francesca Arcelli Fontana , Andrea De Lucia , Andy Zaidman , Filomena Ferrucci

Code comments are significantly helpful in comprehending software programs and also aid developers to save a great deal of time in software maintenance. Code comment generation aims to automatically predict comments in natural language…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Ramin Shahbazi , Fatemeh Fard

Generating and maintaining API documentation with integrity and consistency can be time-consuming and expensive for evolving APIs. To solve this problem, several approaches have been proposed to automatically generate high-quality API…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Shujun Wang , Yongqiang Tian , Dengcheng He

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…

Modern web applications rely heavily on client-side API calls to fetch data, render content, and communicate with backend services. However, the quality of these network interactions (redundant requests, missing cache headers, oversized…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ali Hassaan Mughal , Muhammad Bilal , Noor Fatima

In addition to their vital role in professional software development, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are now increasingly used by non-professional programmers, including end users, scientists and experts from other domains.…

Using APIs to develop software applications is the norm. APIs help developers to build applications faster as they do not need to reinvent the wheel. It is therefore important for developers to understand the APIs that they plan to use.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Ferdian Thung , Kisub Kim , Ting Zhang , Ivana Clairine Irsan , Ratnadira Widyasari , Zhou Yang , David Lo

Bad smells have been defined to describe potential problems in code, possibly pointing out refactoring opportunities. Several empirical studies have highlighted that smells have a negative impact on comprehension and maintainability.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Elder Vicente de Paulo Sobrinho , Marcelo de Almeida Maia

As software proliferates across domains, its aggregate energy footprint has become a major concern. To reduce software's growing environmental footprint, developers need to identify and refactor energy smells: source code implementations,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Mohammadjavad Mehditabar , Saurabhsingh Rajput , Tushar Sharma

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Ivan Tan , Christopher M. Poskitt

REST APIs are prevalent among web service implementations, easing interoperability through the HTTP protocol. API testers and users exploit the widely adopted OpenAPI Specification (OAS), a machine-readable standard to document REST APIs.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Alix Decrop , Xavier Devroey , Mike Papadakis , Pierre-Yves Schobbens , Gilles Perrouin