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

While technical debt grows in absolute numbers as software systems evolve over time, the density of technical debt (technical debt divided by lines of code) is reduced in some cases. This can be explained by either the application of…

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate software artifacts, such as source code, tests, and trace links. Requirements play a central role in shaping the input prompts that guide LLMs, as they are often used as part of…

Software Product Lines SPL are recognized as a successful approach to reuse in software development.Its purpose is to reduce production costs. This approach allows products to be different with respect of particular characteristics and…

Python is widely adopted across various domains, especially in Machine Learning (ML) and traditional software projects. Despite its versatility, Python is susceptible to performance smells, i.e., suboptimal coding practices that can reduce…

Tests that cause spurious failures without any code changes, i.e., flaky tests, hamper regression testing, increase maintenance costs, may shadow real bugs, and decrease trust in tests. While the prevalence and importance of flakiness is…

User Interfaces (UIs) intensively rely on event-driven programming: widgets send UI events, which capture users' interactions, to dedicated objects called controllers. Controllers use several UI listeners that handle these events to produce…

Code ownership -- an approximation of the degree of ownership of a software component -- is one of the important software measures used in quality improvement plans. However, prior studies proposed different variants of code ownership…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…

Flaky tests are defined as tests that manifest non-deterministic behaviour by passing and failing intermittently for the same version of the code. These tests cripple continuous integration with false alerts that waste developers' time and…

Background. Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, and are employed both in open-source and industrial contexts. One of the main goals of code reviews is to find defects in the code, allowing…

Context: Security smells are recurring coding patterns that are indicative of security weakness, and require further inspection. As infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts, such as Ansible and Chef scripts, are used to provision cloud-based…

Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) facilitate rapid software delivery, making fast feedback and minimal downtime essential. While caching has been shown to be an effective technique for tackling pipeline performance and…

Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…

It is generally acknowledged that software testing is both challenging and time-consuming. Understanding the factors that may positively or negatively affect testing effort will point to possibilities for reducing this effort. Consequently…

Burnout affects software developers' mental and physical well-being and contributes to turnover, generating strong concerns in the software industry. Prior research has shown that lack of belonging is associated with higher levels of…

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of…

Flaky tests yield inconsistent results when they are repeatedly executed on the same code revision. They interfere with automated quality assurance of code changes and hinder efficient software testing. Previous work evaluated approaches to…

Machine learning (ML) has rapidly grown in popularity, becoming vital to many industries. Currently, the research on code smells in ML applications lacks tools and studies that address the identification and validity of ML-specific code…