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The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…

During software maintenance and evolution, developers need to deal with a large number of change requests by modifying existing code or adding code into the system. An efficient tackling of change request calls for an accurate localising of…

The number of bug reports in complex software increases dramatically. Now bugs are triaged manually, bug triage or assignment is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. Without knowledge about the structure of the software, testers often…

Unlike most other software quality attributes, testability cannot be evaluated solely based on the characteristics of the source code. The effectiveness of the test suite and the budget assigned to the test highly impact the testability of…

Software developed on public platform is a source of data that can be used to make predictions about those projects. While the individual developing activity may be random and hard to predict, the developing behavior on project level can be…

When machine learning systems meet real world applications, accuracy is only one of several requirements. In this paper, we assay a complementary perspective originating from the increasing availability of pre-trained and regularly…

Developing automated and smart software vulnerability detection models has been receiving great attention from both research and development communities. One of the biggest challenges in this area is the lack of code samples for all…

Modern programming languages (e.g., Java and C#) provide features to separate error-handling code from regular code, seeking to enhance software comprehensibility and maintainability. Nevertheless, the way exception handling (EH) code is…

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Many researchers assume that, for software analytics, "more data is better." We write to show that, at least for learning defect predictors, this may not be true. To demonstrate this, we analyzed hundreds of popular GitHub projects. These…

Open-source software (OSS) dependencies are a dominant component of modern software code bases. Using proven and well-tested OSS components lets developers reduce development time and cost while improving quality. However, heavy reliance on…

Programming courses can be challenging for first year university students, especially for those without prior coding experience. Students initially struggle with code syntax, but as more advanced topics are introduced across a semester, the…

Tangled code changes, commits that conflate unrelated modifications such as bug fixes, refactorings, and enhancements, introduce significant noise into bug datasets and adversely affect the performance of bug prediction models. Addressing…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable coding capabilities. However, assessing code generation based on well-formed properties and aligning it with developer preferences remains challenging. In this paper, we…

Software bugs pose an ever-present concern for developers, and patching such bugs requires a considerable amount of costs through complex operations. In contrast, introducing bugs can be an effortless job, in that even a simple mutation can…

Good software cost prediction is important for effective project management such as budgeting, project planning and control. In this paper, we present an intelligent approach to software cost prediction. By integrating the neuro-fuzzy…

We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…

Many software projects employ manual code review to gatekeep defects and vulnerabilities in the code before integration. However, reviewers often work under time pressure and rely primarily on static inspection, leaving the dynamic aspects…