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Software refactoring aims at improving code quality while preserving the system's external behavior. Although in principle refactoring is a behavior-preserving activity, a study presented by Bavota et al. in 2012 reported the proneness of…

Java projects are often built on top of various third-party libraries. If multiple versions of a library exist on the classpath, JVM will only load one version and shadow the others, which we refer to as dependency conflicts. This would…

With an ever-increasing amount of open source software, the popularity of services like GitHub that facilitate code reuse, and common misconceptions about the licensing of open source software, the problem of license violations in the code…

Program authorship attribution has implications for the privacy of programmers who wish to contribute code anonymously. While previous work has shown that complete files that are individually authored can be attributed, we show here for the…

Background: Performance bugs can lead to severe issues regarding computation efficiency, power consumption, and user experience. Locating these bugs is a difficult task because developers have to judge for every costly operation whether…

Background: The "Technical Debt Dataset" (TDD) is a comprehensive dataset on technical debt (TD) in the main branches of more than 30 Java projects. However, some TD items produced by SonarQube are not included for many commits, for…

A Bug Inducing Commit (BIC) is a code change that introduces a bug into the codebase. Although the abnormal or unexpected behavior caused by the bug may not manifest immediately, it will eventually lead to program failures further down the…

At ICSE'2013, there was the first session ever dedicated to automatic program repair. In this session, Kim et al. presented PAR, a novel template-based approach for fixing Java bugs. We strongly disagree with key points of this paper. Our…

Technical Debt is a metaphor used to describe the situation in which long-term software artifact quality is traded for short-term goals in software projects. In recent years, the concept of self-admitted technical debt (SATD) was proposed,…

Developers build all the software artifacts in development. Existing work has studied the social behavior in software repositories. In one of the most important software repositories, a bug repository, developers create and update bug…

Software is infamous for its poor quality and frequent occurrence of bugs. While there is no doubt that thorough testing is an appropriate answer to ensure sufficient quality, the poor state of software generally suggests that developers…

We study the evolution and impact of bloated dependencies in a single software ecosystem: Java/Maven. Bloated dependencies are third-party libraries that are packaged in the application binary but are not needed to run the application. We…

Bug localisation, the study of developing methods to localise the files requiring changes to resolve bugs, has been researched for a long time to develop methods capable of saving developers' time. Recently, researchers are starting to…

Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…

Recent advances in coding agents have shown remarkable progress in software issue resolution. In practice, real-world issues are typically bug fixes or feature requests in which human developers naturally incorporate refactoring as part of…

Static bug finders have been widely-adopted by developers to find bugs in real world software projects. They leverage predefined heuristic static analysis rules to scan source code or binary code of a software project, and report violations…

Flaky tests produce inconsistent outcomes without code changes, creating major challenges for software developers. An industrial case study reported that developers spend 1.28% of their time repairing flaky tests at a monthly cost of…

The Log4j-Core vulnerability, known as Log4Shell, exposed significant challenges to dependency management in software ecosystems. When a critical vulnerability is disclosed, it is imperative that dependent packages quickly adopt patched…

Bug reports help software development teams enhance software quality, yet their utility is often compromised by unclear or incomplete information. This issue not only hinders developers' ability to quickly understand and resolve bugs but…

Bug prediction has long been considered the "prince" of empirical software engineering research, and accordingly, a substantial body of work has focused on predicting bugs to enable early preventive actions. However, most existing studies…