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This paper presents a case study analyzing Hibernate ecosystem software projects to investigate and demonstrate Code Debt behavior in relation to severity and rework time. The case study carried out revealed that the Code Debt with severity…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-02-13 Bruno Santos de Lima , Rogério Eduardo Garcia

Technical Debt management decisions always imply a trade-off among outcomes at different points in time. In such intertemporal choices, distant outcomes are often valued lower than close ones, a phenomenon known as temporal discounting.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-04-03 Christoph Becker , Fabian Fagerholm , Rahul Mohanani , Alexandros Chatzigeorgiou

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Biruk Asmare Muse , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Isabella Ferreira , Lawrence Arkoh , Anderson Uchôa , Ana Carla Bibiano , Alessandro Garcia , Wesley K. G. Assunção

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Zhao Tian , Zifan Zhang , Tao Xiao , Dong Wang , Masanari Kondo , Junjie Chen , Yasutaka Kamei

Technical Debt (TD) identification in software projects issues is crucial for maintaining code quality, reducing long-term maintenance costs, and improving overall project health. This study advances TD classification using…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Karthik Shivashankar , Mili Orucevic , Maren Maritsdatter Kruke , Antonio Martini

Background: Software companies must balance fast value delivery with quality, a trade-off that can introduce technical debt and potentially waste developers' time. As software systems evolve, technical debt tends to increase. However,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Bhuwan Paudel , Javier Gonzalez-Huerta , Ehsan Zabardast , Eriks Klotins

With the rapid development of deep learning, the implementation of intricate algorithms and substantial data processing have become standard elements of deep learning projects. As a result, the code has become progressively complex as the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Siqi Wang , Xing Hu , Bei Wang , Wenxin Yao , Xin Xia , Xinyu Wang

Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Danilo Silva , Marco Tulio Valente

Context: Previous research on software aging is limited with focus on dynamic runtime indicators like memory and performance, often neglecting evolutionary indicators like source code comments and narrowly examining legacy issues within the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Murali Sridharan , Mika Mäntylä , Leevi Rantala

Managing technical debt (TD) is critical to ensure the sustainability of long-term software projects. However, the time and cost involved in technical debt management (TDM) often discourage practitioners from performing this activity…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-14 João Paulo Biazotto , Daniel Feitosa , Paris Avgeriou , Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…

Technical debt is a well-known challenge in software development, and its negative impact on software quality, maintainability, and performance is widely recognized. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has proven to be a promising…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Srinivas Babu Pandi , Samia A. Binta , Savita Kaushal

This paper presents an analysis of technical debt management through resources allocation policies in software maintenance process during its operation to demonstrate how different strategies leads to the emergence of different behaviors…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-09-23 Eduardo Ferreira Franco , Joaquim Rocha , Hamilton Carvalho , Martins Marcelo , Kechi Hirama

Microservice architectures provide an intuitive promise of high maintainability and evolvability due to loose coupling. However, these quality attributes are notably vulnerable to technical debt (TD). Few studies address TD in microservice…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Klara Borowa , Andrzej Ratkowski , Roberto Verdecchia

Keeping track of and managing Self-Admitted Technical Debts (SATDs) are important to maintaining a healthy software project. This requires much time and effort from human experts to identify the SATDs manually. The current automated…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Zhe Yu , Fahmid Morshed Fahid , Huy Tu , Tim Menzies

In software engineering, technical debt, signifying the compromise between short-term expediency and long-term maintainability, is being addressed by researchers through various machine learning approaches. This study seeks to provide a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Eric L. Melin , Nasir U. Eisty

Refactoring is an essential activity during software evolution. Frequently, practitioners rely on such transformations to improve source code maintainability and quality. As a consequence, this process may produce new source code entities…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Aline Brito , Andre Hora , Marco Tulio Valente

Context. Technical debt (TD) items are constructs in a software system providing short-term benefits but hindering future changes. TD management (TDM) is frequently researched but rarely adopted in practice. Goal. This study aimed to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Marion Wiese , Kamila Serwa , Anastasia Besier , Ariane S. Marion-Jetten , Eva Bittner

The ever-increasing amount, variety as well as generation and processing speed of today's data pose a variety of new challenges for developing Data-Intensive Software Systems (DISS). As with developing other kinds of software systems,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Harald Foidl , Michael Felderer , Stefan Biffl