Related papers: Do practitioners intentionally self-fix Technical …
Background: Many decisions made in Software Engineering practices are intertemporal choices: trade-offs in time between closer options with potential short-term benefit and future options with potential long-term benefit. However, how…
Background. The migration from monolithic systems to microservices involves deep refactoring of the systems. Therefore, the migration usually has a big economic impact and companies tend to postpone several activities during this process,…
Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up…
Software design debt aims to elucidate the rectification attempts of the present design flaws and studies the influence of those to the cost and time of the software. Design smells are a key cause of incurring design debt. Although the…
Flaky tests are software tests that exhibit a seemingly random outcome (pass or fail) when run against the same, identical code. Previous work has examined fixes to flaky tests and has proposed automated solutions to locate as well as fix…
As collaborative coding environments make it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these projects keeps increasing. This increase makes it more difficult for code reviewers to deal with buggy…
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…
Non-deterministically passing and failing test cases, so-called flaky tests, have recently become a focus area of software engineering research. While this research focus has been met with some enthusiastic endorsement from industry, prior…
A hot fix is an unplanned improvement to a specific time-critical issue deployed to a software system in production. While hot fixing is an essential and common activity in software maintenance, it has never been surveyed as a research…
With the increasing complexity of software systems, it becomes very difficult to install, configure, adjust, and maintain them. As systems become more interconnected and diverse, system architects are less able to predict and design the…
Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) refers to circumstances where developers use textual artifacts to explain why the existing implementation is not optimal. Past research in detecting SATD has focused on either identifying SATD…
Flawed TLS certificates are not uncommon on the Internet. While they signal a potential issue, in most cases they have benign causes (e.g., misconfiguration or even deliberate deployment). This adds fuzziness to the decision on whether to…
In traditional management, tasks are typically assigned to individuals, with each worker taking full responsibility for the success or failure of a task. In contrast, modern Agile, Lean, and eXtreme Programming practices advocate for shared…
The recent advancements in machine learning (ML) have demonstrated the potential for providing a powerful solution to build complex prediction systems in a short time. However, in highly regulated industries, such as the financial…
AI code generation tools have gained significant popularity among developers, who use them to assist in software development due to their capability to generate code. Existing studies mainly explored the quality, e.g., correctness and…
As technology has become more embedded into our society, the security of modern-day systems is paramount. One topic which is constantly under discussion is that of patching, or more specifically, the installation of updates that remediate…
Software documentation often struggles to catch up with the pace of software evolution. The lack of correct, complete, and up-to-date documentation results in an increasing number of documentation defects which could introduce delays in…
This is the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 24452 manifesto on Reframing Technical Debt. The manifesto begins with a one-page summary of Values, Beliefs, and Principles. It then elaborates on each Value, Belief, and Principle to explain…
Secure software engineering is a fundamental activity in modern software development. However, while the field of security research has been advancing quite fast, in practice, there is still a vast knowledge gap between the security experts…
Fixing software faults contributes significantly to the cost of software maintenance and evolution. Techniques for reducing these costs require datasets of software faults, as well as an understanding of the faults, for optimal testing and…