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Background: With the rising popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is a growing need to build large and complex AI-based systems in a cost-effective and manageable way. Like with traditional software, Technical Debt (TD) will…

Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate software artifacts, such as source code, tests, and trace links. Requirements play a central role in shaping the input prompts that guide LLMs, as they are often used as part of…

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…

Technical Debt, considered by many to be the 'silent killer' of software projects, has undeniably become part of the everyday vocabulary of software engineers. We know it compromises the internal quality of a system, either deliberately or…

Code smells are symptoms of potential code quality problems that may affect software maintainability, thus increasing development costs and impacting software reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for…

As software proliferates across domains, its aggregate energy footprint has become a major concern. To reduce software's growing environmental footprint, developers need to identify and refactor energy smells: source code implementations,…

Dependencies between modules can trigger ripple effects when changes are made, making maintenance complex and costly, so minimizing these dependencies is crucial. Consequently, understanding what drives dependencies is important. One…

Static Analysis Tools (SATs) are central to security engineering activities, as they enable early identification of code weaknesses without requiring execution. However, their effectiveness is often limited by high false-positive rates and…

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…

AI coding assistants are now widely used in software development. Software developers increasingly integrate AI-generated code into their codebases to improve productivity. Prior studies have shown that AI-generated code may contain code…

Code smells are indicators of potential design flaws in source code and do not appear alone but in combination with other smells, creating complex interactions. While existing literature classifies these smell interactions into collocated,…

Background: Software security is crucial to ensure that the users are protected from undesirable consequences such as malware attacks which can result in loss of data and, subsequently, financial loss. Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor…

Keeping track of and managing Self-Admitted Technical Debts (SATDs) are important to maintaining a healthy software project. This requires much time and effort from human experts to identify the SATDs manually. The current automated…

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 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…

Multi-task learning is a paradigm that leverages information from related tasks to improve the performance of machine learning. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) are comments in the code that indicate not-quite-right code introduced for…

Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific progress, yet its state in large language model (LLM)-based software engineering (SE) research remains poorly understood. This paper presents the first large-scale, empirical study of…

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,…

Test smells are known as bad development practices that reflect poor design and implementation choices in software tests. Over the last decade, test smells were heavily studied to measure their prevalence and impacts on test…