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The context of this work is specification, detection and ultimately removal of detectable harmful patterns in source code that are associated with defects in design and implementation of software. In particular, we investigate five code…

JavaScript (JS) is one of the most popular programming languages, and widely used for web apps and even backend development. Due to its dynamic nature, however, JS applications often have a reputation for poor software quality. As a…

As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These…

[Background] Web communication is universal in cyberspace, and security risks in this domain are devastating. [Aims] We analyzed the prevalence of six security smells in mobile app servers, and we investigated the consequence of these…

As one of the most popular dynamic languages, Python experiences a decrease in readability and maintainability when code smells are present. Recent advancements in Large Language Models have sparked growing interest in AI-enabled tools for…

Code smells signal violations of design principles that degrade the internal quality of evolving software systems. Although many tools detect such anomalies using static metrics, they often ignore the development context in which smells…

Automated batch refactoring has become a de-facto mechanism to restructure software that may have significant design flaws negatively impacting the code quality and maintainability. Although automated batch refactoring techniques are known…

Code smells are seen as major source of technical debt and, as such, should be detected and removed. However, researchers argue that the subjectiveness of the code smells detection process is a major hindrance to mitigate the problem of…

Context: Code smells are considered symptoms of poor design, leading to future problems, such as reduced maintainability. Except for anecdotal cases (e. g. code dropout), a code smell survives until it gets explicitly refactored or removed.…

Context. The adoption of Machine Learning (ML)--enabled systems is steadily increasing. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of ML-specific quality assurance approaches, possibly because of the limited knowledge of how quality-related concerns…

With the ever-increasing use of games, game developers are expected to write efficient code supporting several qualities such as security, maintainability, and performance. However, the continuous need to update the features of games in…

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code…

Angular is one of the most widely adopted frameworks for developing large-scale, dynamic web applications. As projects increase in scope and complexity, developers face growing challenges in managing architecture and maintaining clean,…

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 decades, a variety of refactoring approaches have been…

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,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes, due to their versatility, flexibility, and ability to simulate human reasoning to some extent. However, poor integration of LLM inference…

Context: Code smells (CS) tend to compromise software quality and also demand more effort by developers to maintain and evolve the application throughout its life-cycle. They have long been catalogued with corresponding mitigating solutions…

Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) is complex, largely unconstrained, and hard for developers to understand. As a consequence, ICC is a common source of security vulnerability in Android apps. To promote secure programming…

Code smells and software vulnerabilities both increase maintenance cost, yet they are often handled by separate tools that miss structural context and produce noisy warnings. This paper presents The Code Whisperer, a hybrid framework that…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated their adoption in software engineering contexts. However, concerns persist about the structural quality of the code they produce. In particular, LLMs often replicate poor…