Related papers: An Empirical Study on Maintainable Method Size in …

Background: Modern software systems are commonly built on the top of frameworks. To accelerate the learning process of features provided by frameworks, code samples are made available to assist developers. However, we know little about how…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…

Java Code Generation consists in generating automatically Java code from a Natural Language Text. This NLP task helps in increasing programmers' productivity by providing them with immediate solutions to the simplest and most repetitive…

Modern software relies on libraries and uses them via application programming interfaces (APIs). Correct API usage as well as many software engineering tasks are enabled when APIs have formal specifications. In this work, we analyze the…

Predictive models for software projects' characteristics have been traditionally based on project-level metrics, employing only little developer-level information, or none at all. In this work we suggest novel metrics that capture temporal…

Programming courses can be challenging for first year university students, especially for those without prior coding experience. Students initially struggle with code syntax, but as more advanced topics are introduced across a semester, the…

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…

Several important aspects of software product quality can be evaluated using dynamic metrics that effectively capture and reflect the software's true runtime behavior. While the extent of research in this field is still relatively limited,…

Large language models (LLMs) for code are increasingly used in software development, but they remain static after pretraining while APIs and software libraries continue to evolve. Model editing offers a lightweight alternative to retraining…

Most engineers use measurements to make decisions. However, measurements are rarely used for decisions about constructing software products. While many approaches to measuring attributes of software (``metrics'') have been developed, they…

Since decade understanding of programs has become a compulsory task for the students as well as for others who are involved in the process of developing software and providing solutions to open problems. In that aspect showing the problem…

Adding small code snippets at key points to existing code fragments is called instrumentation. It is an established technique to debug certain otherwise hard to solve faults, such as memory management issues and data races. Dynamic…

The relevance of code comprehension in a developer's daily work was recognized more than 40 years ago. Consequently, many experiments were conducted to find out how developers could be supported during code comprehension and which code…

JavaScript has become one of the most widely used languages for Web development. However, it is challenging to ensure the correctness and reliability of Web applications written in JavaScript, due to their dynamic and event-driven features.…

Incorrect placement of methods within classes is a typical code smell called Feature Envy, which causes additional maintenance and cost during evolution. To remove this design flaw, several Move Method refactoring tools have been proposed.…

Software development methods are usually not applied by the book. Companies are under pressure to continuously deploy software products that meet market needs and stakeholders' requests. To implement efficient and effective development…

In recent years, the number of cyber attacks has grown rapidly. An effective way to reduce the attack surface and protect software is adoption of methodologies that apply security at each step of the software development lifecycle. While…

Programming education should aim to provide students with a broad range of skills that they will later use while developing software. An important aspect in this is their ability to write code that is not only correct but also of high…

Nearly all modern software suffers from bloat that negatively impacts its performance and security. To combat this problem, several automated techniques have been proposed to debloat software. A key metric used in many of these works to…

Dependencies between modules can trigger ripple effects when changes are made, making maintenance complex and costly, so minimizing these dependencies is crucial. Consequently, understanding what drives dependencies is important. One…