Related papers: A systematic literature review on the code smells …

Code smells indicate the potential problems of software quality so that developers can identify refactoring opportunities by detecting code smells. State-of-the-art approaches leverage heuristics, machine learning, and deep learning to…

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…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…

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…

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…

Bad smells have been defined to describe potential problems in code, possibly pointing out refactoring opportunities. Several empirical studies have highlighted that smells have a negative impact on comprehension and maintainability.…

The low cost and rapid provisioning capabilities have made open-source cloud a desirable platform to launch industrial applications. However, as open-source cloud moves towards maturity, it still suffers from quality issues like code…

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…

Code smells are indicators of potential design flaws in source code and do not appear alone but in combination with other smells, creating complex interactions. While existing literature classifies these smell interactions into collocated,…

Automated deployment and management of Cloud applications relies on descriptions of their deployment topologies, often referred to as Infrastructure Code. As the complexity of applications and their deployment models increases, developers…

Background: Test smells indicate potential problems in the design and implementation of automated software tests that may negatively impact test code maintainability, coverage, and reliability. When poorly described, manual tests written in…

Unlike most other software quality attributes, testability cannot be evaluated solely based on the characteristics of the source code. The effectiveness of the test suite and the budget assigned to the test highly impact the testability of…

JavaScript has been consistently among the most popular programming languages in the past decade. However, its dynamic, weakly-typed, and asynchronous nature can make it challenging to write maintainable code for developers without in-depth…

\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…

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…

Automated code smell detection faces persistent challenges due to the subjectivity of heuristic rules and the limited performance of traditional ML/DL models. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative, their adoption…

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…

Software clones have been an active area of research for the past two decades. However, although numerous clone detection tools are now available, only a small fraction of the literature has focused on tool evaluation, and this is in fact…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

Despite the recent trend of developing and applying neural source code models to software engineering tasks, the quality of such models is insufficient for real-world use. This is because there could be noise in the source code corpora used…