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Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…

Reusing software libraries is a pillar of modern software engineering. In 2022, the average Java application depends on 40 third-party libraries. Relying on such libraries exposes a project to potential vulnerabilities and may put an…

Fault localization is a process to find the location of faults. It determines the root cause of the failure. It identifies the causes of abnormal behaviour of a faulty program. It identifies exactly where the bugs are. Existing fault…

Java projects are often built on top of various third-party libraries. If multiple versions of a library exist on the classpath, JVM will only load one version and shadow the others, which we refer to as dependency conflicts. This would…

Software bloat is code that is packaged in an application but is actually not necessary to run the application. The presence of software bloat is an issue for security, for performance, and for maintenance. In this paper, we introduce a…

Open-source software supply chain attacks aim at infecting downstream users by poisoning open-source packages. The common way of consuming such artifacts is through package repositories and the development of vetting strategies to detect…

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 debt aims to elucidate the rectification attempts of the present design flaws and studies the influence of those to the cost and time of the software. Design smells are a key cause of incurring design debt. Although the…

Dependency management systems are a critical component in software development, enabling projects to incorporate existing functionality efficiently. However, misconfigurations and malicious actors in these systems pose severe security…

Debugging of large software systems consisting of many processes accessing shared resources is a very difficult task. Many commercial systems record essential events during system execution for post-mortem analysis. However, the event…

Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source…

Dependency cycles pose a significant challenge to software quality and maintainability. However, there is limited understanding of how practitioners resolve dependency cycles in real-world scenarios. This paper presents an empirical study…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

The explosive growth of mini-game platforms has led to widespread code plagiarism, where malicious users access popular games' source code and republish them with modifications. While existing static analysis tools can detect simple…

Social network research has focused on hyperlink graphs, bibliographic citations, friend/follow patterns, influence spread, etc. Large software repositories also form a highly valuable networked artifact, usually in the form of a collection…

Decisions on which classes to refactor are fraught with difficulty. The problem of identifying candidate classes becomes acute when confronted with large systems comprising hundreds or thousands of classes. In this paper, we describe a…

Large organizations have diverse product offerings to meet various business needs. To increase revenue, its common these days to offer software products as integrated product suite(s) rather than individual products. Creating and…

Modern software systems are often built by leveraging code written by others in the form of libraries and packages to accelerate their development. While there are many benefits to using third-party packages, software projects often become…

Prototype pollution is a recent vulnerability that affects JavaScript code, leading to high impact attacks such as arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability is rooted in JavaScript's prototype-based inheritance, enabling attackers 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…