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Bug prediction has long been considered the "prince" of empirical software engineering research, and accordingly, a substantial body of work has focused on predicting bugs to enable early preventive actions. However, most existing studies…

Change-prone classes or modules are defined as software components in the source code which are likely to change in the future. Change-proneness prediction is useful to the maintenance team as they can optimize and focus their testing…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

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.…

One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…

One of the biggest expense in software development is the maintenance. Therefore, it is critical to comprehend what triggers maintenance and if it may be predicted. Numerous research have demonstrated that specific methods of assessing the…

Existing software tools enable characterizing and measuring the amount of technical debt at selective granularity levels. In this paper we aim to study the evolution and characteristics of technical debt in open-source software. We carry…

With the increasing complexity of large-scale software systems, identifying all necessary modifications for a specific change is challenging. Co-changed methods, which are methods frequently modified together, are crucial for understanding…

Background. Test resources are usually limited and therefore it is often not possible to completely test an application before a release. To cope with the problem of scarce resources, development teams can apply defect prediction to…

Test resources are usually limited and therefore it is often not possible to completely test an application before a release. Therefore, testers need to focus their activities on the relevant code regions. In this paper, we introduce an…

Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…

Predicting the number of defects in a project is critical for project test managers to allocate budget, resources, and schedule for testing, support and maintenance efforts. Software Defect Prediction models predict the number of defects in…

Software source code often harbours "hotspots": small portions of the code that change far more often than the rest of the project and thus concentrate maintenance activity. We mine the complete version histories of 91 evolving, actively…

To improve the efficiency of software maintenance, change prediction techniques have been proposed to predict frequently changing modules. Whereas existing techniques focus primarily on class-level prediction, method-level prediction allows…

In recent years, defect prediction has received a great deal of attention in the empirical software engineering world. Predicting software defects before the maintenance phase is very important not only to decrease the maintenance costs but…

Change-based code review is used widely in industrial software development. Thus, research on tools that help the reviewer to achieve better review performance can have a high impact. We analyze one possibility to provide cognitive support…

Real software, the kind working programmers produce by the kLOC to solve real-world problems, tends to be "natural", like speech or natural language; it tends to be highly repetitive and predictable. Researchers have captured this…

Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…

This paper studies the problem of predicting the coding effort for a subsequent year of development by analysing metrics extracted from project repositories, with an emphasis on projects containing XML code. The study considers thirteen…