Related papers: On the Prevalence, Evolution, and Impact of Code S…
Context: Technical Debt (TD) discusses the negative impact of sub-optimal decisions to cope with the need-for-speed in software development. Code Technical Debt Items (TDI) are atomic elements of TD that can be observed in code artefacts.…
Code samples play a pivotal role in open-source ecosystems (OSSECO), serving as lightweight artifacts that support knowledge transfer, onboarding, and framework adoption. Despite their instructional relevance, these samples are often…
The accuracy reported for code smell-detecting tools varies depending on the dataset used to evaluate the tools. Our survey of 45 existing datasets reveals that the adequacy of a dataset for detecting smells highly depends on relevant…
Architectural decay imposes real costs in terms of developer effort, system correctness, and performance. Over time, those problems are likely to be revealed as explicit implementation issues (defects, feature changes, etc.). Recent…
AI coding assistants are now widely used in software development. Software developers increasingly integrate AI-generated code into their codebases to improve productivity. Prior studies have shown that AI-generated code may contain code…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate software artifacts, such as source code, tests, and trace links. Requirements play a central role in shaping the input prompts that guide LLMs, as they are often used as part of…
Background: Test smells indicate potential problems in the design and implementation of automated software tests that may negatively impact test code maintainability, coverage, and reliability. When poorly described, manual tests written in…
Elixir is a new functional programming language whose popularity is rising in the industry. However, there are few works in the literature focused on studying the internal quality of systems implemented in this language. Particularly, to…
The aims of this paper are: 1) to identify "worst smells", i.e., bad smells that never have a good reason to exist, 2) to determine the frequency, change-proneness, and severity associated with worst smells, and 3) to identify the "worst…
Spreadsheets are commonly used in organizations as a programming tool for business-related calculations and decision making. Since faults in spreadsheets can have severe business impacts, a number of approaches from general software…
The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…
The low cost and rapid provisioning capabilities have made open-source cloud a desirable platform to launch industrial applications. However, as open-source cloud moves towards maturity, it still suffers from quality issues like code…
Context. Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in software engineering workflows for tasks including code generation, summarization, repair, and testing. Empirical studies report productivity gains, improved comprehension,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are one of the most promising developments in the field of artificial intelligence, and the software engineering community has readily noticed their potential role in the software development life-cycle.…
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…
Technical debt has become a common metaphor for the accumulation of software design and implementation choices that seek fast initial gains but that are under par and counterproductive in the long run. However, as a metaphor, technical debt…
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…
The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping software development as developers integrate these LLMs into their applications. In such applications, prompts serve as the primary means of interacting with LLMs. Despite the…
Duplicated code or code clones are a kind of code smell that have both positive and negative impacts on the development and maintenance of software systems. Software clone research in the past mostly focused on the detection and analysis of…
Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…