Related papers: To Type or Not to Type? A Systematic Comparison of…

Dynamically typed programming languages such as Python and JavaScript defer type checking to run time. VM implementations can improve performance by eliminating redundant dynamic type checks. However, type inference analyses are often…

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…

Recent years have seen growing interest in the retrofitting of type systems onto dynamically-typed programming languages, in order to improve type safety, programmer productivity, or performance. In such cases, type system developers must…

Improved test case prioritization means that software developers can detect and fix more software faults sooner than usual. But is there one "best" prioritization algorithm? Or do different kinds of projects deserve special kinds of…

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…

Typical JavaScript (JS) programs feature a large number of object property accesses. Hence, fast property reads and writes are crucial for good performance. Unfortunately, many (often redundant) dynamic checks are implied in each property…

Developers frequently reuse Stack Overflow code snippets, yet the quality of these snippets remains unevenly understood, particularly across programming languages and geographic contexts. This study investigates code quality in Stack…

The context of this work is specification, detection and ultimately removal of detectable harmful patterns in source code that are associated with defects in design and implementation of software. In particular, we investigate five code…

Static analysis has established itself as a weapon of choice for detecting security vulnerabilities. Taint analysis in particular is a very general and powerful technique, where security policies are expressed in terms of forbidden flows,…

Source code comes in different shapes and forms. Previous research has already shown code to be more predictable than natural language as well as highlighted its statistical predictability at the token level: source code can be natural.…

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…

Context: Code smells (CS) tend to compromise software quality and also demand more effort by developers to maintain and evolve the application throughout its life-cycle. They have long been catalogued with corresponding mitigating solutions…

Usability is a crucial factor but one of the most neglected concerns in open source software (OSS). While far from an ideal approach, a common practice that OSS communities adopt to collaboratively address usability is through discussions…

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,…

With their increasing capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are now used across many industries. They have become useful tools for software engineers and support a wide range of development tasks. As LLMs are increasingly used in…

Vulnerability detection is crucial for maintaining software security, and recent research has explored the use of Language Models (LMs) for this task. While LMs have shown promising results, their performance has been inconsistent across…

Modern websites extensively rely on JavaScript to implement both functionality and tracking. Existing privacy enhancing content blocking tools struggle against mixed scripts, which simultaneously implement both functionality and tracking,…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly automates various parts of the software development tasks. Although AI has enhanced the productivity of development tasks, it remains unstudied whether AI essentially outperforms humans in…

Web developers routinely rely on third-party Java-Script libraries such as jQuery to enhance the functionality of their sites. However, if not properly maintained, such dependencies can create attack vectors allowing a site to be…

Context. JavaScript is a popular programming language today with several implementations competing for market dominance. Although a specification document and a conformance test suite exist to guide engine development, bugs occur and have…