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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…

Software architecture consists of series of decisions taken to give a structural solution that meets all the technical and operational requirements. The paper involves code refactoring. Code refactoring is a process of changing the internal…

Docker, the industry standard for packaging and deploying applications, leverages Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to facilitate the creation of images through Dockerfiles. However, maintaining Dockerfiles presents significant…

Code smells are seen as major source of technical debt and, as such, should be detected and removed. However, researchers argue that the subjectiveness of the code smells detection process is a major hindrance to mitigate the problem of…

In today's world, the focus of programmers has shifted from writing complex, error-prone code to prioritizing simple, clear, efficient, and sustainable code that makes programs easier to understand. Code refactoring plays a critical role in…

Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice to improve the understandability and maintainability of the source code. The Extract Method refactoring is considered as "Swiss army knife" of refactorings,…

Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…

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…

Software systems are evolving by adding new functions and modifying existing functions over time. Through the evolution, the structure of software is becoming more complex and so the understandability and maintainability of software systems…

\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…

Refactoring is a crucial technique for improving the efficiency and maintainability of software by restructuring its internal design while preserving its external behavior. While classical programs have benefited from various refactoring…

Context: Security is vital to software developed for commercial or personal use. Although more organizations are realizing the importance of applying secure coding practices, in many of them, security concerns are not known or addressed…

This report investigates the relationship between software refactoring and behavior preservation. Existing behavior preservation analyses often lack comprehensive insights into refactoring rejections and do not provide actionable solutions.…

Data contamination presents a critical barrier preventing widespread industrial adoption of advanced software engineering techniques that leverage code language models (CLMs). This phenomenon occurs when evaluation data inadvertently…

Injection-based testing while refactoring is a pattern that minimizes the need for manual editing when altering the behaviour of a code base. Neither does it rely on a compilation or a linking process nor does it make assumptions on the…

As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These…

Background: Programming skills are advantageous to navigate today's society, so it is important to teach them to students. However, failure rates for programming courses are high, and especially students who fall behind early in…

Software refactoring plays an important role in increasing code quality. One of the most popular refactoring types is the Move Method refactoring. It is usually applied when a method depends more on members of other classes than on its own…

Programs are a kind of communication to both computers and people, hence as students are trained to write programs they need to learn to write well-designed, readable code rather than code that simply functions correctly. The difficulty in…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated their adoption in software engineering contexts. However, concerns persist about the structural quality of the code they produce. In particular, LLMs often replicate poor…