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The migration process between different third-party software libraries is hard, complex and error-prone. Typically, during a library migration process, developers opt to replace methods from the retired library with other methods from a new…

Document ranking experiments should be repeatable. However, the interaction between multi-threaded indexing and score ties during retrieval may yield non-deterministic rankings, making repeatability not as trivial as one might imagine. In…

Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…

Background: Test-driven development (TDD) is a technique that repeats short coding cycles interleaved with testing. The developer first writes a unit test for the desired functionality, followed by the necessary production code, and…

Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running…

For more than thirty years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people. The underlying assumption seems to be that "happy and satisfied software developers perform…

Non-deterministically passing and failing test cases, so-called flaky tests, have recently become a focus area of software engineering research. While this research focus has been met with some enthusiastic endorsement from industry, prior…

Software quality in use comprises quality from the user's perspective. It has gained its importance in e-government applications, mobile-based applications, embedded systems, and even business process development. User's decisions on…

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.,…

Context:The extent of post-release use of software affects the number of faults, thus biasing quality metrics and adversely affecting associated decisions. The proprietary nature of usage data limited deeper exploration of this subject in…

Quality attributes and constraints are among the main drivers of architectural decision making. The quality attributes are improved or damaged by the architectural decisions, while restrictions directly include or exclude parts of the…

Automatically evaluate the correctness of programming assignments is rather straightforward using unit and integration tests. However, programming tasks can be solved in multiple ways, many of which, although correct, are inelegant. For…

When teaching Programming and Software Engineering in Bachelor's Degree programs, the emphasis on creating functional software projects often overshadows the focus on software quality, a trend that aligns with ACM curricula recommendations.…

Maintaining code quality in large-scale software systems presents significant challenges, particularly in settings where a large numbers of engineers work concurrently on a codebase. This paper introduces Code Quality Score (CQS) system to…

Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…

Despite its crucial role in research experiments, code correctness is often presumed only on the basis of the perceived quality of results. This assumption comes with the risk of erroneous outcomes and potentially misleading findings. To…

As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…

A recurring problem in software development is incorrect decision making on the techniques, methods and tools to be used. Mostly, these decisions are based on developers' perceptions about them. A factor influencing people's perceptions is…

During software evolution, inexperienced developers may introduce design anti-patterns when they modify their software systems to fix bugs or to add new functionalities based on changes in requirements. Developers may also use design…

Recent studies have largely investigated the detection of class design anomalies. They proposed a large set of metrics that help in detecting those anomalies and in predicting the quality of class design. While those studies and the…