Related papers: Smells-sus: Sustainability Smells in IaC

A smell in software source code denotes an indication of suboptimal design and implementation decisions, potentially hindering the code understanding and, in turn, raising the likelihood of being prone to changes and faults. Identifying…

Test smells are defined as sub-optimal design choices developers make when implementing test cases. Hence, similar to code smells, the research community has produced numerous test smell detection tools to investigate the impact of test…

Dependency management in modern software development poses many challenges for developers who wish to stay up to date with the latest features and fixes whilst ensuring backwards compatibility. Project maintainers have opted for varied, and…

Software design smells are design attributes which violate the fundamental design principles. Design smells are a key cause of design debt. Although the activities of design smell identification and measurement are predominantly considered…

Code smells are characteristics of the software that indicates a code or design problem which can make software hard to understand, evolve, and maintain. The code smell detection tools proposed in the literature produce different results,…

As the development of Solidity contracts on Ethereum, more developers are reusing them on other compatible blockchains. However, developers may overlook the differences between the designs of the blockchain system, such as the Gas Mechanism…

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) currently exhibit low success rates in generating correct and intent-aligned Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This research investigated methods to improve LLM-based IaC generation, specifically for Terraform, by…

Software systems naturally evolve, and this evolution often brings design problems that cause system degradation. Architectural smells are typical symptoms of such problems, and several of these smells are related to undesired dependencies…

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables scalable and automated IT infrastructure management but is prone to errors that can lead to security vulnerabilities, outages, and data loss. While prior research has focused on detecting IaC issues,…

Context: Securing microservice-based applications is crucial, as many IT companies are delivering their businesses through microservices. If security smells affect microservice-based applications, they can possibly suffer from security…

JavaScript has been consistently among the most popular programming languages in the past decade. However, its dynamic, weakly-typed, and asynchronous nature can make it challenging to write maintainable code for developers without in-depth…

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…

User Interfaces (UIs) intensively rely on event-driven programming: widgets send UI events, which capture users' interactions, to dedicated objects called controllers. Controllers use several UI listeners that handle these events to produce…

While a substantial body of prior research has investigated the form and nature of production code, comparatively little attention has examined characteristics of test code, and, in particular, test smells in that code. In this paper, we…

Nowadays, more and more applications are developed for running on a distributed ledger technology, namely dApps. The business logic of dApps is usually implemented within smart contracts developed through Solidity, a programming language…

Architectural smells such as God Class, Cyclic Dependency, and Hub-like Dependency degrade software quality and maintainability. Existing tools detect such smells but rarely suggest how to fix them. This paper explores the use of…

Background. Architectural smells and code smells are symptoms of bad code or design that can cause different quality problems, such as faults, technical debt, or difficulties with maintenance and evolution. Some studies show that code…

Context. The adoption of Machine Learning (ML)--enabled systems is steadily increasing. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of ML-specific quality assurance approaches, possibly because of the limited knowledge of how quality-related concerns…

CONTEXT: There has been a rapid growth in the use of data analytics to underpin evidence-based software engineering. However the combination of complex techniques, diverse reporting standards and poorly understood underlying phenomena are…