Related papers: What really changes when developers intend to impr…

Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase,…

In recent years, defect prediction has received a great deal of attention in the empirical software engineering world. Predicting software defects before the maintenance phase is very important not only to decrease the maintenance costs but…

Source code is changed for a reason, e.g., to adapt, correct, or adapt it. This reason can provide valuable insight into the development process but is rarely explicitly documented when the change is committed to a source code repository.…

Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…

Software engineering and information systems practices seek ultimately to create the flawless product. One of the tools used to improve the quality of software development is the use of metrics. In this paper, metrics retrieved from open…

In current research, there are contrasting results about the applicability of software source code metrics as features for defect prediction models. The goal of the paper is to evaluate the adoption of software metrics in models for…

Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…

Corrective maintenance is crucial to ensure the quality of software, thereby improving reliability and user experience. In a version control system (VCS), developers write commit messages to document their changes and support later…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Software quality is critical in modern software engineering, especially in large and evolving codebases. This study analyzes the evolution of software quality metrics in five successive versions of the open-source Java testing framework…

Background: Understanding maintenance activities performed in a source code repository could help practitioners reduce uncertainty and improve cost-effectiveness by planning ahead and pre-allocating resources towards source code…

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,…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

Code metrics have been widely used to estimate software maintenance effort. Metrics have generally been used to guide developer effort to reduce or avoid future maintenance burdens. Size is the simplest and most widely deployed metric. The…

Fault-proneness is a measure that indicates the possibility of programming errors occurring within a software system. On the other hand, change-proneness refers to the potential for modifications to be made to the software. Both of these…

Code quality is an attribute composed of various metrics, such as complexity, readability, testability, interoperability, reusability, and the use of good or bad practices, among others. Static code analysis tools aim to measure a set of…

As software projects progress, quality of code assumes paramount importance as it affects reliability, maintainability and security of software. For this reason, static analysis tools are used in developer workflows to flag code quality…

Developing software with the source code open to the public is prevalent; however, similar to its closed counter part, open-source has quality problems, which cause functional failures, such as program breakdowns, and non-functional, such…

Code ownership -- an approximation of the degree of ownership of a software component -- is one of the important software measures used in quality improvement plans. However, prior studies proposed different variants of code ownership…

The software development community has been using code quality metrics for the last five decades. Despite their wide adoption, code quality metrics have attracted a fair share of criticism. In this paper, first, we carry out a qualitative…