Related papers: Acknowledging Good Java Code with Code Perfumes

Unit testing is a vital part of the software development process and involves developers writing code to verify or assert production code. Furthermore, to help comprehend the test case and troubleshoot issues, developers have the option to…

Unit tests are widely used to check source code quality, but they can be too coarse-grained or ill-suited for testing individual program statements. We introduce inline tests to make it easier to check for faults in statements. We motivate…

Profiling tools (also known as profilers) play an important role in understanding program performance at runtime, such as hotspots, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies. While profilers have been proven to be useful, they give extra burden to…

Code review is a common process that is used by developers, in which a reviewer provides useful comments or points out defects in the submitted source code changes via pull request. Code review has been widely used for both industry and…

Code quality is and will be a crucial factor while developing new software code, requiring appropriate tools to ensure functional and reliable code. Machine learning techniques are still rarely used for software engineering tools, missing…

This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…

Motivation: Students learning to program often reach states where they are stuck and can make no forward progress. An automatically generated next-step hint can help them make forward progress and support their learning. It is important to…

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…

CONTEXT: There has been a rapid growth in the use of data analytics to underpin evidence-based software engineering. However the combination of complex techniques, diverse reporting standards and poorly understood underlying phenomena are…

Reflective systems allow their own structures to be altered from within. Here we are concerned with a style of reflection, called linguistic reflection, which is the ability of a running program to generate new program fragments and to…

Test smells are coding issues that typically arise from inadequate practices, a lack of knowledge about effective testing, or deadline pressures to complete projects. The presence of test smells can negatively impact the maintainability and…

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…

Proponents of software verification have argued that simpler code is easier to verify: that is, that verification tools issue fewer false positives and require less human intervention when analyzing simpler code. We empirically validate…

Test Impact Analysis is an approach to obtain a subset of tests impacted by code changes. This approach is mainly applied to unit testing where the link between the code and its associated tests is easy to obtain. On the integration level,…

READMEs shape first impressions of software projects, yet what constitutes a good README varies across audiences and contexts. Research software needs reproducibility details, while open-source libraries might prioritize quick-start guides.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays extensively used for various types of software engineering tasks, primarily code generation. Previous research has shown how suitable prompt engineering could help developers in improving their code…

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…

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,…

Worked examples (solutions to typical programming problems presented as a source code in a certain language and are used to explain the topics from a programming class) are among the most popular types of learning content in programming…

Open-source software supply chain attacks aim at infecting downstream users by poisoning open-source packages. The common way of consuming such artifacts is through package repositories and the development of vetting strategies to detect…