Related papers: Follow Your Nose -- Which Code Smells are Worth Ch…

The accuracy reported for code smell-detecting tools varies depending on the dataset used to evaluate the tools. Our survey of 45 existing datasets reveals that the adequacy of a dataset for detecting smells highly depends on relevant…

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…

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…

Java remains one of the most popular programming languages in education. Although Java programming education is well supported by study materials, learners also need more immediate support on the problems they face in their own code. When…

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…

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…

Similarly to production code, code smells also occur in test code, where they are called test smells. Test smells have a detrimental effect not only on test code but also on the production code that is being tested. To date, the majority of…

A smell in software source code denotes an indication of suboptimal design and implementation decisions, potentially hindering the code understanding and, in turn, raising the likelihood of being prone to changes and faults. Identifying…

Code smells are seen as major source of technical debt and, as such, should be detected and removed. However, researchers argue that the subjectiveness of the code smells detection process is a major hindrance to mitigate the problem of…

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…

The context of this work is specification, detection and ultimately removal of detectable harmful patterns in source code that are associated with defects in design and implementation of software. In particular, we investigate five code…

Background. Architectural smells and code smells are symptoms of bad code or design that can cause different quality problems, such as faults, technical debt, or difficulties with maintenance and evolution. Some studies show that code…

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,…

Context: Code smells (CS) tend to compromise software quality and also demand more effort by developers to maintain and evolve the application throughout its life-cycle. They have long been catalogued with corresponding mitigating solutions…

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…

Context: Security is vital to software developed for commercial or personal use. Although more organizations are realizing the importance of applying secure coding practices, in many of them, security concerns are not known or addressed…

Developing test code may be a time-consuming task that usually requires much effort and cost, especially when it is done manually. Besides, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead…

Unlike most other software quality attributes, testability cannot be evaluated solely based on the characteristics of the source code. The effectiveness of the test suite and the budget assigned to the test highly impact the testability of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes, due to their versatility, flexibility, and ability to simulate human reasoning to some extent. However, poor integration of LLM inference…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…