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During software development, poor design and implementation choices can detrimentally impact software maintainability. Design smells, recurring patterns of poorly designed fragments, signify these issues. Role-stereotypes denote the generic…

Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior while improving its internal structure. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and…

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…

We present a novel approach to detect refactoring opportunities by measuring the participation of references between types in instances of patterns representing design flaws. This technique is validated using an experiment where we analyse…

Context: Modern code review is a widely employed technique in both industrial and open-source projects, serving to enhance software quality, share knowledge, and ensure compliance with coding standards and guidelines. While code review is…

While language models are increasingly more proficient at code generation, they still frequently generate incorrect programs. Many of these programs are obviously wrong, but others are more subtle and pass weaker correctness checks such as…

Commits often involve refactorings -- behavior-preserving code modifications aiming at software design improvements. Refactoring operations pose a challenge to code reviewers, as distinguishing them from behavior-altering changes is often…

Refactoring is an established technique from the OO-community to restructure code: it aims at improving software readability, maintainability and extensibility. Although refactoring is not tied to the OO-paradigm in particular, its ideas…

Students are able to produce correctly functioning program code even though they have a fragile understanding of how it actually works. Questions derived automatically from individual exercise submissions (QLC) can probe if and how well the…

Automated source code refactoring, particularly extract method refactoring, is a crucial and frequently employed technique during software development. Despite its importance and frequent use by practitioners, current automated techniques…

Code smells are symptoms of potential code quality problems that may affect software maintainability, thus increasing development costs and impacting software reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for…

Context. The adoption of Machine Learning (ML)--enabled systems is steadily increasing. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of ML-specific quality assurance approaches, possibly because of the limited knowledge of how quality-related concerns…

Unreadable code could be a breeding ground for errors. Thus, previous work defined approaches based on machine learning to automatically assess code readability that can warn developers when some code artifacts (e.g., classes) become…

Refactorings must not alter the program's functionality. However, not all refactorings fulfill this requirement. Hence, one must explicitly check that a refactoring does not alter the functionality. Since one rarely has a formal…

Developers often refactor source code to improve its quality during software development. A challenge in refactoring is to determine if it can be applied or not. To help with this decision-making process, we aim to search for past…

Simulation modelling systems are routinely used to test or understand real-world scenarios in a controlled setting. They have found numerous applications in scientific research, engineering, and industrial operations. Due to their complex…

Parsons problems are a type of programming activity that present learners with blocks of existing code and requiring them to arrange those blocks to form a program rather than write the code from scratch. Micro Parsons problems extend this…

In this paper, we focus on studying duplicate logging statements, which are logging statements that have the same static text message. We manually studied over 4K duplicate logging statements and their surrounding code in five large-scale…

Context: Code smells are considered symptoms of poor design, leading to future problems, such as reduced maintainability. Except for anecdotal cases (e. g. code dropout), a code smell survives until it gets explicitly refactored or removed.…

For a novice programmer, coding is equivalent to a nightmare. A novice programmer tries to replicate steps provided by the faculty and on compilation gets a number of errors which the novice programmer is not able to resolve. This system…