Related papers: Prevalence of Code Smells in Reinforcement Learnin…

Safety-critical robot systems need thorough testing to expose design flaws and software bugs which could endanger humans. Testing in simulation is becoming increasingly popular, as it can be applied early in the development process and does…

Code Smell, similar to a bad smell, is a surface indication of something tainted but in terms of software writing practices. This metric is an indication of a deeper problem lies within the code and is associated with an issue which is…

Reinforcement learning is increasingly used for code-centric tasks. These tasks include code generation, summarization, understanding, repair, testing, and optimization. This trend is growing faster with large language models and autonomous…

This Innovative Practice full paper explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance the teaching of code refactoring in software engineering courses through real-time, context-aware feedback. Refactoring improves code quality but is…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in many complex decision-making tasks. However, safety concerns are raised during deploying RL in real-world applications, leading to a growing demand for safe RL algorithms, such…

Dependency management in modern software development poses many challenges for developers who wish to stay up to date with the latest features and fixes whilst ensuring backwards compatibility. Project maintainers have opted for varied, and…

Developing test code may be a time-consuming task that usually requires much effort and cost, especially when it is done manually. Besides, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead…

Machine Learning (ML) projects incur novel challenges in their development and productionisation over traditional software applications, though established principles and best practices in ensuring the project's software quality still…

Nowadays, modern applications are developed using components written in different programming languages. These systems introduce several advantages. However, as the number of languages increases, so does the challenges related to the…

Code review that detects and locates defects and other quality issues plays an important role in software quality control. One type of issue that may impact the quality of software is code smells. Yet, little is known about the extent to…

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…

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…

Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly being adopted in different industries. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a subdomain of ML used to produce intelligent agents. Despite recent developments in DRL technology, the main challenges that…

With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLM), reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a pivotal technique for code generation and optimization in various domains. This paper presents a systematic survey of the application of…

Similarly to production code, code smells also occur in test code, where they are called test smells. Test smells have a detrimental effect not only on test code but also on the production code that is being tested. To date, the majority of…

Architectural code smells erode software maintainability and are costly to repair manually, yet unlike localized bugs, they require cross-module reasoning about design intent that challenges both developers and automated tools. While large…

Lack of reliability is a well-known issue for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. This problem has gained increasing attention in recent years, and efforts to improve it have grown substantially. To aid RL researchers and production…

Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…

Context: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to generate program code. Much research has been reported on the functional correctness of generated code, but there is far less on code quality. Objectives: In this study,…

Angular is one of the most widely adopted frameworks for developing large-scale, dynamic web applications. As projects increase in scope and complexity, developers face growing challenges in managing architecture and maintaining clean,…