Related papers: Evaluating the Dependency Between Cyclomatic Compl…

Cohesion is a core design quality that has a great impact on posterior development and maintenance. By the nature of software, the cohesion of a system is diminished as the system evolves. God classes are code defects resulting from…

This is a companion draft to paper 'Software Clustering: Unifying Syntactic and Semantic Features', in proceedings of the 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2012). It discusses the clustering process in detail, which…

Nowadays, the need for causal discovery is ubiquitous. A better understanding of not just the stochastic dependencies between parts of a system, but also the actual cause-effect relations, is essential for all parts of science. Thus, the…

Large repositories of source code for research tend to limit their utility to static analysis of the code, as they give no guarantees on whether the projects are compilable, much less runnable in any way. The immediate consequence of the…

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…

The automated translation of C code to Java code is a notoriously difficult task, fraught with challenges stemming from fundamental paradigm shifts (procedural vs. Object Oriented), memory models (manual pointers vs. Garbage Collection),…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been subject to extensive research in the past few years. This is particularly true for the potential of LLMs to generate formative programming feedback for novice learners at university. In contrast to…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

Conventional methods of obtaining student feedback on course experience face a fundamental tradeoff between feedback frequency and quality: as feedback requests become more frequent, participation often declines, and responses become less…

Current LLM evaluations often rely on a single instruction template, overlooking models' sensitivity to instruction style-a critical aspect for real-world deployments. We present RCScore, a multi-dimensional framework quantifying how…

The problem of class imbalance is extensive for focusing on numerous applications in the real world. In such a situation, nearly all of the examples are labeled as one class called majority class, while far fewer examples are labeled as the…

We present a novel approach to detect refactoring opportunities by measuring the participation of references between types in instances of patterns representing design flaws. This technique is validated using an experiment where we analyse…

Test effectiveness refers to the capability of a test suite in exposing faults in software. It is crucial to be aware of factors that influence this capability. We aim at inferring the causal relationship between the two factors (i.e.,…

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…

We study the sample complexity of multiclass prediction in several learning settings. For the PAC setting our analysis reveals a surprising phenomenon: In sharp contrast to binary classification, we show that there exist multiclass…

Test Suite Minimization (TSM) reduces the size of test suites while preserving their fault detection capability. In black-box TSM, reduction is performed without analyzing production code. While several black-box TSM approaches have…

Massive classification, a classification task defined over a vast number of classes (hundreds of thousands or even millions), has become an essential part of many real-world systems, such as face recognition. Existing methods, including the…

We introduce a new framework for a descriptive complexity approach to arithmetic computations. We define a hierarchy of classes based on the idea of counting assignments to free function variables in first-order formulae. We completely…

Programs are a kind of communication to both computers and people, hence as students are trained to write programs they need to learn to write well-designed, readable code rather than code that simply functions correctly. The difficulty in…

Despite the vast success of Deep Neural Networks in numerous application domains, it has been shown that such models are not robust i.e., they are vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations of the input. While extensive work has been…