Related papers: Architecture Smells vs. Concurrency Bugs: an Explo…

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…

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

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…

Architectural technical debt (ATD) represents trade-offs in software architecture that accelerate initial development but create long-term maintenance challenges. ATD, in particular when self-admitted, impacts the foundational structure of…

Understanding what drives code instability is essential for effective software maintenance, as unstable classes require larger or more frequent edits and increase the risk of unintended side effects. Although code smells are widely believed…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are pervasive in the current computer science landscape. Yet, there still exists a lack of software engineering experience and best practices in this field. One such best practice,…

Existing software tools enable characterizing and measuring the amount of technical debt at selective granularity levels. In this paper we aim to study the evolution and characteristics of technical debt in open-source software. We carry…

Context: Software specifications are usually written in natural language and may suffer from imprecision, ambiguity, and other quality issues, called thereafter, requirement smells. Requirement smells can hinder the development of a project…

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…

Advances in AI have led to new types of technical debt in software engineering projects. AI-based competition platforms face challenges due to rapid prototyping and a lack of adherence to software engineering principles by participants,…

Nowadays, we are witnessing an increasing adoption of Deep Learning (DL) based software systems in many industries. Designing a DL program requires constructing a deep neural network (DNN) and then training it on a dataset. This process…

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…

The promise of Large Language Models in automated software engineering is often measured by functional correctness, overlooking the critical issue of long term maintainability. This paper presents a systematic audit of technical debt in…

Code samples play a pivotal role in open-source ecosystems (OSSECO), serving as lightweight artifacts that support knowledge transfer, onboarding, and framework adoption. Despite their instructional relevance, these samples are often…

As a software system evolves, its architecture tends to degrade, and gradually impedes software maintenance and evolution activities and negatively impacts the quality attributes of the system. The main root cause behind architecture…

Technical Debt analysis is increasing in popularity as nowadays researchers and industry are adopting various tools for static code analysis to evaluate the quality of their code. Despite this, empirical studies on software projects are…

The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…

We report on a large-scale empirical study investigating the relevance of socio-technical congruence over key basic software quality metrics, namely, bugs and churn. In particular, we explore whether alignment or misalignment of social…

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…

Artificial Intelligence has gained a lot of traction in the recent years, with machine learning notably starting to see more applications across a varied range of fields. One specific machine learning application that is of interest to us…