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Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…

As developers debug, developers formulate hypotheses about the cause of the defect and gather evidence to test these hypotheses. To better understand the role of hypotheses in debugging, we conducted two studies. In a preliminary study, we…

Creativity is a critical skill that professional software engineers leverage to tackle difficult problems. In higher education, multiple efforts have been made to spark creative skills of engineering students. However, creativity is a vague…

Bug triage can be defined as the process of assigning a developer to a bug report. The duty of the bug triage team is to study the developers profiles well in order to make an appropriate match between the developers and the incoming bug…

This paper presents a large-scale study that investigates the bug resolution characteristics among popular Github projects written in different programming languages. We explore correlations but, of course, we cannot infer causation.…

Over time, software systems suffer gradual quality decay and therefore costs can rise if organizations fail to take proactive countermeasures. Quality control is the first step to avoiding this cost trap. Continuous quality assessments help…

The use of autonomous bots for automatic support in software development tasks is increasing. In the past, however, they were not always perceived positively and sometimes experienced a negative bias compared to their human counterparts. We…

Bug localization is a tedious activity in the bug fixing process in which a software developer tries to locate bugs in the source code described in a bug report. Since this process is time-consuming and requires additional knowledge about…

Debugging is considered as a rigorous but important feature of software engineering process. Since more than a decade, the software engineering research community is exploring different techniques for removal of faults from programs but it…

The modern code review process is an integral part of the current software development practice. Considerable effort is given here to inspect code changes, find defects, suggest an improvement, and address the suggestions of the reviewers.…

The problem of software fault localization may be viewed as an approach for finding hidden faults or bugs in the existing program codes which are syntactically correct and give fault free output for some input instances but fail for all…

Software is prone to bugs and failures. Security bugs are those that expose or share privileged information and access in violation of the software's requirements. Given the seriousness of security bugs, there are centralized mechanisms for…

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: Security regressions are vulnerabilities introduced in a previously unaffected software system. They often happen as a result of source code changes (e.g., a bug fix) and can have severe effects. Aims: To increase the…

Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…

Experts agree that keeping systems up to date is a powerful security measure. Previous work found that users sometimes explicitly refrain from performing timely updates, e.g., due to bad experiences which has a negative impact on end-user…

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…

Bugs are inevitable in software development, and their reporting in open repositories can enhance software transparency and reliability assessment. This study aims to extract information from the issue tracking system Jira and proposes a…

A widespread belief in the blockchain security community is that automated techniques are only good for detecting shallow bugs, typically of small value. In this paper, we present the techniques and insights that have led us to repeatable…