Related papers: Investigating Issues that Lead to Code Technical D…

Machine learning (ML) systems are rapidly increasing in size, are acquiring new capabilities, and are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings. As with other powerful technologies, safety for ML should be a leading research priority.…

Context: Software start-ups are young companies aiming to build and market software-intensive products fast with little resources. Aiming to accelerate time-to-market, start-ups often opt for ad-hoc engineering practices, make shortcuts in…

Generative AI is accelerating software development, but may quietly shift where the most significant risks lie. As AI generates code faster than teams can understand it, two under appreciated forms of debt accumulate: cognitive debt, the…

Following the recent surge in adoption of machine learning (ML), the negative impact that improper use of ML can have on users and society is now also widely recognised. To address this issue, policy makers and other stakeholders, such as…

The practical application of machine learning and data science (ML/DS) techniques present a range of procedural issues to be examined and resolve including those relating to the data issues, methodologies, assumptions, and applicable…

While Machine Learning (ML) technologies are widely adopted in many mission critical fields to support intelligent decision-making, concerns remain about system resilience against ML-specific security attacks and privacy breaches as well as…

Code completion aims at speeding up code writing by recommending to developers the next tokens they are likely to type. Deep Learning (DL) models pushed the boundaries of code completion by redefining what these coding assistants can do: We…

The increasing inclusion of Machine Learning (ML) models in safety critical systems like autonomous cars have led to the development of multiple model-based ML testing techniques. One common denominator of these testing techniques is their…

Requirements engineering (RE) activities for machine learning (ML) are not well-established and researched in the literature. Many issues and challenges exist when specifying, designing, and developing ML-enabled systems. Adding more focus…

As large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and Gemini become integrated into software development workflows, developers increasingly leave traces of AI involvement in their code comments. Among these, some comments…

In the process of software evolution, developers often sacrifice the long-term code quality to satisfy the short-term goals due to specific reasons, which is called technical debt. In particular, self-admitted technical debt (SATD) refers…

Machine learning is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that is becoming essential for several critical systems, making it a good target for threat actors. Threat actors exploit different Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)…

A growing variety of prompt engineering techniques has been proposed for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet systematic evaluation of each technique on individual software engineering (SE) tasks remains underexplored. In this study, we…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in software via APIs like OpenAI, offering powerful AI features without heavy infrastructure. Yet these integrations bring their own form of self-admitted technical debt (SATD). In this…

In the software development industry, technical debt is regarded as a critical issue in term of the negative consequences such as increased software development cost, low product quality, decreased maintainability, and slowed progress to…

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) refers to a form of technical debt in which developers explicitly acknowledge and document the existence of technical shortcuts, workarounds, or temporary solutions within the codebase. Over recent years,…

Context: Technical Debt (TD) discusses the negative impact of sub-optimal decisions to cope with the need-for-speed in software development. Code Technical Debt Items (TDI) are atomic elements of TD that can be observed in code artefacts.…

Code review is a crucial process before deploying code to production, as it validates the code, provides suggestions for improvements, and identifies errors such as missed edge cases. In projects with regular production releases, the effort…

Technical Debt management decisions always imply a trade-off among outcomes at different points in time. In such intertemporal choices, distant outcomes are often valued lower than close ones, a phenomenon known as temporal discounting.…

Technical debt---design shortcuts taken to optimize for delivery speed---is a critical part of long-term software costs. Consequently, automatically detecting technical debt is a high priority for software practitioners. Software quality…