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Machine learning (ML) components are being added to more and more critical and impactful software systems, but the software development process of real-world production systems from prototyped ML models remains challenging with additional…

Code smells indicate software design problems that harm software quality. Data-intensive systems that frequently access databases often suffer from SQL code smells besides the traditional smells. While there have been extensive studies on…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices, which might hinder comprehension, increase code complexity and fault-proneness and decrease maintainability of software systems. The aim of our study was to perform a…

Unique developmental and operational characteristics of ML components as well as their inherent uncertainty demand robust engineering principles are used to ensure their quality. We aim to determine how software systems can be (re-)…

Context: Logging is an important part of modern software projects; logs are used in several tasks such as debugging and testing. Due to the complex nature of logging, it remains a difficult task with several pitfalls that could have serious…

As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These…

Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) enable software developers and managers to collect and resolve issues collaboratively. While researchers have extensively analysed ITS data to automate or assist specific activities such as issue assignments,…

Community smells are negative patterns in software development teams' interactions that impede their ability to successfully create software. Examples are team members working in isolation, lack of communication and collaboration across…

Code smell is a great challenge in software refactoring, which indicates latent design or implementation flaws that may degrade the software maintainability and evolution. Over the past of decades, the research on code smell has received…

As large language models (LLMs) become integral to diverse applications, ensuring their reliability under varying input conditions is crucial. One key issue affecting this reliability is order sensitivity, wherein slight variations in the…

Context: Social debt describes the accumulation of unforeseen project costs (or potential costs) from sub-optimal software development processes. Community smells are sociotechnical anti-patterns and one source of social debt that impact…

Multileaved comparison methods generalize interleaved comparison methods to provide a scalable approach for comparing ranking systems based on regular user interactions. Such methods enable the increasingly rapid research and development of…

Fault diagnosis is the problem of determining a set of faulty system components that explain discrepancies between observed and expected behavior. Due to the intrinsic relation between observations and sensors placed on a system, sensors'…

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…

It has been hypothesized that some form of "modular" structure in artificial neural networks should be useful for learning, compositionality, and generalization. However, defining and quantifying modularity remains an open problem. We cast…

To ensure the quality of a software system, developers perform an activity known as unit testing, where they write code (known as test cases) that verifies the individual software units that make up the system. Like production code, test…

Causal Inference offers a fundamental approach for advancing empirical software engineering (ESE) beyond traditional statistical association, enabling researchers to rigorously identify and quantify causal relationships in software…

Code review is a key practice in software engineering, ensuring quality and collaboration. However, industrial Merge Request (MR) workflows often deviate from standardized review processes, with many MRs serving non-review purposes (e.g.,…

Understanding what drives code instability is essential for effective software maintenance, as unstable classes require larger or more frequent edits and increase the risk of unintended side effects. Although code smells are widely believed…

Modularity is a desirable characteristic for software systems. In this article we propose to use a quantitative method from complex network sciences to estimate the coherence between the modularity of the dependency network of large open…