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Recommender systems are a valuable tool for software engineers. For example, they can provide developers with a ranked list of files likely to contain a bug, or multiple auto-complete suggestions for a given method stub. However, the way…
Automated batch refactoring has become a de-facto mechanism to restructure software that may have significant design flaws negatively impacting the code quality and maintainability. Although automated batch refactoring techniques are known…
Software development, despite all the significant improvements it contributes to society, is a very expensive high-risk venture. Every software project commences with the intention to deliver a software product on time and within budget,…
The large amount of information and the increasing complexity of applications constrain developers to have stand-alone and reusable components from libraries and component markets.Our approach consists in developing methods to evaluate the…
Software refactoring is the process of changing the structure of software without any alteration in its behavior and functionality. Presuming it is carried out in appropriate opportunities, refactoring enhances software quality…
Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…
In software development, the identification of source code file experts is an important task. Identifying these experts helps to improve software maintenance and evolution activities, such as developing new features, code reviews, and bug…
Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…
Software development projects management is a complex endeavor because it requires dealing with numerous unforeseen events that constantly arise along the way and that go against the expectations that had been established at the beginning.…
Identifiers, such as method and variable names, form a large portion of source code. Therefore, low-quality identifiers can substantially hinder code comprehension. To support developers in using meaningful identifiers, several…
With the advent of generative LLMs and their advanced code generation capabilities, some people already envision the end of traditional software engineering, as LLMs may be able to produce high-quality code based solely on the requirements…
Software reliability is an important quality attrib-ute, often evaluated as either a function of time or of system structures. The goal of this study is to have this metric cover both for component-based software, be-cause its reliability…
Teaching agile software development by pairing lectures with hands-on projects has become the norm. This approach poses the problem of grading and evaluating practical project work as well as process conformance during development. Yet, few…
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…
Incorrect placement of methods within classes is a typical code smell called Feature Envy, which causes additional maintenance and cost during evolution. To remove this design flaw, several Move Method refactoring tools have been proposed.…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
A large number of metrics have been proposed for the quality of object oriented software. Many of these metrics have not been properly validated due to poor methods of validation and non acceptance of metrics on scientific grounds. In the…
Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…
The primary value of AI agents in software development lies in their ability to extend the developer's capacity for reasoning and action, not to supplant human involvement. To showcase how to use agents working in tandem with developers, we…
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced transformative potential in automated code generation, addressing a wide range of software engineering challenges. However, empirical evaluation of LLM-based code generation lacks…