Related papers: The Broken Windows Theory Applies to Technical Deb…

The Impostor Phenomenon (IP) impacts a significant portion of the Software Engineering workforce, yet it is often viewed primarily through an internal individual lens. In this position paper, we propose framing the prevalence of IP as a…

In reliability engineering, we need to understand system dependencies, cause-effect relations, identify critical components, and analyze how they trigger failures. Three prominent graph models commonly used for these purposes are fault…

Bellwether effect refers to the existence of exemplary projects (called the Bellwether) within a historical dataset to be used for improved prediction performance. Recent studies have shown an implicit assumption of using recently completed…

Background. The popularity of tools for analyzing Technical Debt, and particularly the popularity of SonarQube, is increasing rapidly. SonarQube proposes a set of coding rules, which represent something wrong in the code that will soon be…

One of the prerequisites of any organization is an unvarying sustainability in the dynamic and competitive industrial environment. Development of high quality software is therefore an inevitable constraint of any software industry. Defect…

Recent years have seen a surge in applications and technologies aimed at motivating users to achieve personal goals and improve their wellbeing. However, these often fail to promote long-term behaviour change, and sometimes even backfire.…

Technical Debt management is an important aspect in the training of Software Engineering students. In this paper we study the effect of two assessment strategies in an educational context: One based on penalisation, the other based on…

Contextuality was originally defined only for consistently connected systems of random variables (those without disturbance/signaling). Contextuality-by-Default theory (CbD) offers an extension of the notion of contextuality to…

Software and systems traceability is essential for downstream tasks such as data-driven software analysis and intelligent tool development. However, despite the increasing attention to mining and understanding technical debt in software…

For more than thirty years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people. The underlying assumption seems to be that "happy and satisfied software developers perform…

Changes are inherent in software development, often increasing developers' perception of instability. Understanding the relationship between human factors and Software Engineering processes is crucial to mitigating and preventing issues.…

The temporal dimension of citation accumulation poses fundamental challenges for quantitative research evaluations, particularly in assessing disruptive and consolidating research through the disruption index (D). While prior studies…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices, which might hinder comprehension, increase code complexity and fault-proneness and decrease maintainability of software systems. The aim of our study was to perform a…

Knowledge of window style, content, location and grammatical structure may be used to classify documents as originating within a particular discipline or may be used to place a document on a theory versus practice spectrum. This distinction…

Code smells indicate software design problems that harm software quality. Data-intensive systems that frequently access databases often suffer from SQL code smells besides the traditional smells. While there have been extensive studies on…

Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running…

Context: In addressing how best to estimate how much effort is required to develop software, a recent study found that using exemplary and recently completed projects [forming Bellwether moving windows (BMW)] in software effort prediction…

Web tracking (WT) systems are advanced technologies used to monitor and analyze online user behavior. Initially focused on HTML and static webpages, these systems have evolved with the proliferation of IoT, edge computing, and Big Data,…

Smart contracts are self-enforcing agreements that are employed to exchange assets without the approval of trusted third parties. This feature has encouraged various sectors to make use of smart contracts when transacting. Experience shows…

Dockerfiles enable the creation of portable container-based execution environments for the application code, and have become an important part of the modern software development process. As Dockerfiles are a form of Infrastructure-as-Code…