Related papers: Does Code Smell Frequency Have a Relationship with…

Architectural decay imposes real costs in terms of developer effort, system correctness, and performance. Over time, those problems are likely to be revealed as explicit implementation issues (defects, feature changes, etc.). Recent…

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…

To ensure the quality of a software system, developers perform an activity known as unit testing, where they write code (known as test cases) that verifies the individual software units that make up the system. Like production code, test…

This study explores the intricate relationship between sentiment analysis (SA) and code quality within machine learning (ML) projects, illustrating how the emotional dynamics of developers affect the technical and functional attributes of…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch enable children to be creative while learning to program. Even though the block-based approach simplifies the creation of programs, learning to program can nevertheless be challenging.…

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…

Test smells are coding issues that typically arise from inadequate practices, a lack of knowledge about effective testing, or deadline pressures to complete projects. The presence of test smells can negatively impact the maintainability and…

Modern software systems heavily rely on third-party dependencies, making software supply chain security a critical concern. We introduce the concept of software supply chain smells as structural indicators that signal potential security…

\underline{Context:} Logging is a fundamental yet complex practice in software engineering, essential for monitoring, debugging, and auditing software systems. With the increasing integration of machine learning (ML) components into…

Regression testing is an important phase to deliver software with quality. However, flaky tests hamper the evaluation of test results and can increase costs. This is because a flaky test may pass or fail non-deterministically and to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity among software engineers. A crucial aspect of developing effective code generation LLMs is to evaluate these models using a robust benchmark. Evaluation benchmarks with quality issues can…

Developers need to make a constant effort to improve the quality of their code if they want to stay productive. Tools that highlight code locations that could benefit from refactoring are thus highly desirable. The most common name for such…

Code smells signal violations of design principles that degrade the internal quality of evolving software systems. Although many tools detect such anomalies using static metrics, they often ignore the development context in which smells…

As one of the most popular dynamic languages, Python experiences a decrease in readability and maintainability when code smells are present. Recent advancements in Large Language Models have sparked growing interest in AI-enabled tools for…

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

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…

Elixir is a new functional programming language whose popularity is rising in the industry. However, there are few works in the literature focused on studying the internal quality of systems implemented in this language. Particularly, to…

Code style is an aesthetic choice exhibited in source code that reflects programmers individual coding habits. This study is the first to investigate whether code style can be used as an indicator to identify good programmers. Data from…

Duplicated code or code clones are a kind of code smell that have both positive and negative impacts on the development and maintenance of software systems. Software clone research in the past mostly focused on the detection and analysis of…

When teaching Programming and Software Engineering in Bachelor's Degree programs, the emphasis on creating functional software projects often overshadows the focus on software quality, a trend that aligns with ACM curricula recommendations.…