Related papers: An Empirical Study on the Impact of Code Duplicati…

Software quality is critical in modern software engineering, especially in large and evolving codebases. This study analyzes the evolution of software quality metrics in five successive versions of the open-source Java testing framework…

Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…

While functionality and correctness of code has traditionally been the main focus of computing educators, quality aspects of code are getting increasingly more attention. High-quality code contributes to the maintainability of software…

In this work, we developed an algorithm for detecting code quality issues in the templates of online programming tasks, validated it, and conducted an empirical study on the dataset of student solutions. The algorithm consists of analyzing…

It is necessary to gather real refactoring instances while conducting empirical studies on refactoring. However, existing refactoring detection approaches are insufficient in terms of their accuracy and coverage. Reducing the manual effort…

Architecture optimization is the process of automatically generating design options, typically to enhance software's quantifiable quality attributes, such as performance and reliability. Multi-objective optimization approaches have been…

In this paper, the term formula code refers to fragments of source code that implement a mathematical formula. We present empirical studies that analyze the diversity and frequency of formula code in open-source-software projects. In an…

Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the…

Layered architecture represents the software structure in the form of layers. Every element in the software is assigned to one of the layers such that the relationship amongst the elements is maintained. A set of design principles rules the…

Detecting semantic interference remains a challenge in collaborative software development. Recent lightweight static analysis techniques improve efficiency over SDG-based methods, but they still suffer from a high rate of false positives. A…

During compilation from Java source code to bytecode, some information is irreversibly lost. In other words, compilation and decompilation of Java code is not symmetric. Consequently, the decompilation process, which aims at producing…

Refactoring is a software engineering practice that aims to improve code quality without altering program behavior. Although automated refactoring tools have been extensively studied, their practical applicability remains limited. Recent…

Tracking statements in the commit history of a project is in many cases useful for supporting various software maintenance, comprehension, and evolution tasks. A high level of accuracy can facilitate the adoption of code tracking tools by…

With the growing reliance on automated code completion tools in software development, the need for comprehensive evaluation benchmarks has become critical. Existing benchmarks focus more on code completion in function and class level by…

Source code summarization involves creating brief descriptions of source code in natural language. These descriptions are a key component of software documentation such as JavaDocs. Automatic code summarization is a prized target of…

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…

Context: Dependency Injection (DI) is a commonly applied mechanism to decouple classes from their dependencies in order to provide higher modularization. However, bad DI practices often lead to negative consequences, such as increasing…

Software undergoes constant changes to support new requirements, address bugs, enhance performance, and ensure maintainability. Thus, developers spend a great portion of their workday trying to understand and review the code changes of…

Code ownership -- an approximation of the degree of ownership of a software component -- is one of the important software measures used in quality improvement plans. However, prior studies proposed different variants of code ownership…

Developers often extract methods to improve readability, understanding, and reuse, while inlining keeps logic in one block. Prior work based on static metrics has not shown clear differences between these practices, and the human side of…