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Quantum computing is a rapidly growing field attracting the interest of both researchers and software developers. Supported by its numerous open-source tools, developers can now build, test, or run their quantum algorithms. Although the…

Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up…

This paper presents the source code analysis of a file reader server socket program (connection-oriented sockets) developed in Java, to illustrate the identification, impact analysis and solutions to remove five important software security…

Many approaches for testing configurable software systems start from the same assumption: it is impossible to test all configurations. This motivated the definition of variability-aware abstractions and sampling techniques to cope with…

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,…

GraphQL is a novel query language for implementing service-based software architectures. The language is gaining momentum and it is now used by major software companies, such as Facebook and GitHub. However, we still lack empirical evidence…

In principle, Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline failures provide valuable feedback to developers on code-related errors. In practice, however, pipeline jobs often fail intermittently due to non-deterministic tests, network outages,…

Research software (also called scientific software) is essential for advancing scientific endeavours. Research software encapsulates complex algorithms and domain-specific knowledge and is a fundamental component of all science. A pervasive…

Context: Programmers frequently look for the code of previously solved problems that they can adapt for their own problem. Despite existing example code on the web, on sites like Stack Overflow, cryptographic Application Programming…

Background: Despite the widespread use of automated security defect detection tools, software projects still contain many security defects that could result in serious damage. Such tools are largely context-insensitive and may not cover all…

Background: Research software plays an important role in solving real-life problems, empowering scientific innovations, and handling emergency situations. Therefore, the correctness and trustworthiness of research software are of absolute…

Code review is a popular practice where developers critique each others' changes. Since automated builds can identify low-level issues (e.g., syntactic errors, regression bugs), it is not uncommon for software organizations to incorporate…

Software reuse may result in software bloat when significant portions of application dependencies are effectively unused. Several tools exist to remove unused (byte)code from an application or its dependencies, thus producing smaller…

We propose a framework for robust evaluation of reasoning capabilities of language models, using functional variants of benchmarks. Models that solve a reasoning test should exhibit no difference in performance over the static version of a…

Previous research has shown that crypto APIs are hard for developers to understand and difficult for them to use. They consequently rely on unvalidated boilerplate code from online resources where security vulnerabilities are common. We…

Unit testing has been considered as having a key role in building high quality software, and therefore it has been widely used in practice. However, data on the relationship between unit testing and aspects of software quality remain…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is being increasingly used to learn and adapt application behavior in many domains, including large-scale and safety critical systems, as for example, autonomous driving. With the advent of plug-n-play RL…

Unintended failures during a computation are painful but frequent during software development. Failures due to external reasons (e.g., missing files, no permissions) can be caught by exception handlers. Programming failures, such as calling…

Productive Failure (PF) is a learning approach where students initially tackle novel problems targeting concepts they have not yet learned, followed by a consolidation phase where these concepts are taught. Recent application in STEM…

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are over-stressed to accelerate High-Performance Computing applications and are used to accelerate Deep Neural Networks in several domains where they have a life expectancy of many years. These conditions…