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Using open-source dependencies is essential in modern software development. However, this practice implies significant trust in third-party code, while there is little support for developers to assess this trust. As a consequence, attacks…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Raphina Liu , Sofia Bobadilla , Benoit Baudry , Martin Monperrus

Background. Containerization technologies are widely adopted in the DevOps workflow. The most commonly used one is Docker, which requires developers to define a specification file (Dockerfile) to build the image used for creating…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Giovanni Rosa , Simone Scalabrino , Rocco Oliveto

Modern software systems heavily rely on third-party dependencies, making software supply chain security a critical concern. We introduce the concept of software supply chain smells as structural indicators that signal potential security…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Larissa Schmid , Diogo Gaspar , Raphina Liu , Sofia Bobadilla , Benoit Baudry , Martin Monperrus

Fault-proneness is an indication of programming errors that decreases software quality and maintainability. On the contrary, code smell is a symptom of potential design problems which has impact on fault-proneness. In the literature,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-10 Md. Masudur Rahman , Toukir Ahammed , Md. Mahbubul Alam Joarder , Kazi Sakib

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of managing IT infrastructure via programmable configuration files (also called IaC scripts). Like other software artifacts, IaC scripts may contain security smells, which are coding patterns that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-08 Nuno Saavedra , João F. Ferreira

Integrated Development Environments shape developers' daily experience, yet the empirical study of their usability and user experience (UX) remains limited. This work presents an LLM-assisted approach to detecting UX smells in Visual Studio…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Andrés Rodriguez , Juan Cruz Gardey , Alejandra Garrido

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Anh Ho , Anh M. T. Bui , Phuong T. Nguyen , Amleto Di Salle , Bach Le

The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Mohammad Ghafari , Pascal Gadient , Oscar Nierstrasz

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Luca Pascarella , Davide Spadini , Fabio Palomba , Alberto Bacchelli

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Arnaud Blouin , Valéria Lelli , Benoit Baudry , Fabien Coulon

Code smells are widely used indicators of poor code quality, revealing structural problems and areas where improvement can be made. Although extensively studied in object-oriented languages, functional programming languages remain…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Walber Araújo , José Truta , Lucas Vegi , Marco Tulio Valente , João Brunet

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Denivan Campos , Larissa Rocha , Ivan Machado

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Sarra Habchi , Naouel Moha , Romain Rouvoy

Similarly to production code, code smells also occur in test code, where they are called test smells. Test smells have a detrimental effect not only on test code but also on the production code that is being tested. To date, the majority of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-11 Tongjie Wang , Yaroslav Golubev , Oleg Smirnov , Jiawei Li , Timofey Bryksin , Iftekhar Ahmed

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 Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Abbas Javan Jafari , Diego Elias Costa , Rabe Abdalkareem , Emad Shihab , Nikolaos Tsantalis

During software development, poor design and implementation choices can detrimentally impact software maintainability. Design smells, recurring patterns of poorly designed fragments, signify these issues. Role-stereotypes denote the generic…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-28 Daniel Ogenrwot , Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende , John Businge , Michel R. V. Chaudron

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…

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Asif Imran , Tevfik Kosar

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-04-29 Francesca Arcelli Fontanaa , Valentina Lenarduzzi , Riccardo Roveda , Davide Taibi

Context. Code smells, which are recurring anomalies in design or style, have been extensively researched in professional code. However, their significance in block-based projects created by novices is still largely unknown. Block-based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Ricardo Hidalgo Aragón , Jesús M. González-Barahona , Gregorio Robles