Related papers: Towards Heuristics for Supporting the Validation o…

Best testing practices state that tests should verify a single functionality or behavior of the system. Tests that verify multiple behaviors are harder to understand, lack focus, and are more coupled to the production code. An attempt to…

The low cost and rapid provisioning capabilities have made open-source cloud a desirable platform to launch industrial applications. However, as open-source cloud moves towards maturity, it still suffers from quality issues like code…

Test smells can pose difficulties during testing activities, such as poor maintainability, non-deterministic behavior, and incomplete verification. Existing research has extensively addressed test smells in automated software tests but…

Developers often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…

Code analysis is fundamental in Software Engineering, supporting debugging, optimization, and security assessment. Human developers approach it through syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. Traditional tools are…

Background: Developers spend a lot of their time on understanding source code. Static code analysis tools can draw attention to code that is difficult for developers to understand. However, most of the findings are based on non-validated…

Context. Code smells, which are recurring anomalies in design or style, have been extensively researched in professional code. However, their significance in block-based projects created by novices is still largely unknown. Block-based…

While LLM-based agents are able to tackle a wide variety of code reasoning questions, the answers are not always correct. This prevents the agent from being useful in situations where high precision is desired: (1) helping a software…

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…

Synthetic verification techniques such as generating test cases and reward modelling are common ways to enhance the coding capabilities of large language models (LLM) beyond predefined tests. Additionally, code verification has recently…

Software comments are critical for human understanding of software, and as such many comment generation techniques have been proposed. However, we find that a systematic evaluation of the factual accuracy of generated comments is rare; only…

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…

Code smells and software vulnerabilities both increase maintenance cost, yet they are often handled by separate tools that miss structural context and produce noisy warnings. This paper presents The Code Whisperer, a hybrid framework that…

Authentication is a critical security feature for confirming the identity of a system's users, typically implemented with help from frameworks like Spring Security. It is a complex feature which should be robustly tested at all stages of…

This study explores the intricate relationship between sentiment analysis (SA) and code quality within machine learning (ML) projects, illustrating how the emotional dynamics of developers affect the technical and functional attributes of…

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has changed software development, with tools like Copilot, JetBrains AI Assistant, and others boosting developers' productivity. However, developers now spend more time reviewing code than…

Determining the most effective Large Language Model for code smell detection presents a complex challenge. This study introduces a structured methodology and evaluation matrix to tackle this issue, leveraging a curated dataset of code…

Software systems naturally evolve, and this evolution often brings design problems that cause system degradation. Architectural smells are typical symptoms of such problems, and several of these smells are related to undesired dependencies…

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,…

The code smell is a sign of design and development flaws in a software system that reduces the reusability and maintainability of the system. Refactoring is done as an ongoing practice to remove the code smell from the program code. Among…