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A code smell is a surface indicator of an inherent problem in the system, most often due to deviation from standard coding practices on the developers part during the development phase. Studies observe that code smells made the code more…

Code smells indicate the potential problems of software quality so that developers can identify refactoring opportunities by detecting code smells. State-of-the-art approaches leverage heuristics, machine learning, and deep learning to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential to enhance software development through automated code generation and refactoring, reducing development time and improving code quality. This study empirically evaluates StarCoder2, an LLM…

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…

Eradication of code smells is often pointed out as a way to improve readability, extensibility and design in existing software. However, code smell detection in large systems remains time consuming and error-prone, partly due to the…

The popularity of machine learning has wildly expanded in recent years. Machine learning techniques have been heatedly studied in academia and applied in the industry to create business value. However, there is a lack of guidelines for code…

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for program synthesis, they lack the global view needed to develop useful abstractions; they generally predict programs one at a time, often repeating the same functionality.…

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…

Creating functions is at the center of writing computer programs. But there has been little empirical research on how this is done and what are the considerations that developers use. We design an experiment in which we can compare the…

To remain useful for their users, software systems need to continuously enhance and extend their functionality. Nevertheless, in many object-oriented applications, features are not represented explicitly. The lack of modularization is known…

A smell in software source code denotes an indication of suboptimal design and implementation decisions, potentially hindering the code understanding and, in turn, raising the likelihood of being prone to changes and faults. Identifying…

Enterprise level software is implemented using multi-layer architecture. These layers are often implemented using de-coupled solutions with millions of lines of code. Programmers often have to track and debug a function call from user…

Energy consumption of mobile apps is a domain that is receiving a lot of attention from researchers. Recent studies indicate that the energy consumption of mobile devices could be improved by improving the quality of mobile apps. Frequent…

Software development agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Agent, Devin, and OpenAI Codex are being increasingly integrated into developer workflows. While prior work has evaluated agent capabilities for code completion and…

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…

The Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in code-related tasks. However, most research focuses on improving the output quality of LLMs (e.g., correctness), and less attention has been paid to the LLM input (e.g.,…

Code smells as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Many times they are the result of so called technical debt. Our study showed that the interest in code smells research is increasing. However, most of the publications are…

Although Extract Method is a key refactoring for improving program comprehension, refactoring tools for such purpose are often underused. To address this shortcoming, we present JExtract, a recommendation system based on structural…

The progress made in code modeling has been tremendous in recent years thanks to the design of natural language processing learning approaches based on state-of-the-art model architectures. Nevertheless, we believe that the current…

Code smells are indicators of potential design flaws in source code and do not appear alone but in combination with other smells, creating complex interactions. While existing literature classifies these smell interactions into collocated,…