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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…
The learning and usage of an API is supported by official documentation. Like source code, API documentation is itself a software product. Several research results show that bad design in API documentation can make the reuse of API features…
The ever-growing popularity of mobile phones has brought additional challenges to the software development lifecycle. Mobile applications (apps, for short) ought to provide the same set of features as conventional software, with limited…
Code comments are important in software development because they directly influence software maintainability and overall quality. Bad practices of code comments lead to code comment smells, negatively impacting software maintenance. Recent…
Context: Securing microservice-based applications is crucial, as many IT companies are delivering their businesses through microservices. If security smells affect microservice-based applications, they can possibly suffer from security…
Effective software development relies on managing both collaboration and technology, but sociotechnical challenges can harm team dynamics and increase technical debt. Although teams working on ML enabled systems are interdisciplinary,…
Refactoring is the art of improving the design of a system without altering its external behavior. Refactoring has become a well established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research…
Test smells are coding issues that typically arise from inadequate practices, a lack of knowledge about effective testing, or deadline pressures to complete projects. The presence of test smells can negatively impact the maintainability and…
The rapid adoption of AI coding agents for software development has raised important questions about the quality and maintainability of the code they produce. While prior studies have examined AI-generated source code, the impact of AI…
There is burgeoning interest in designing AI-based systems to assist humans in designing computing systems, including tools that automatically generate computer code. The most notable of these comes in the form of the first self-described…
Community smells appear in sub-optimal software development community structures, causing unforeseen additional project costs, e.g., lower productivity and more technical debt. Previous studies analyzed and predicted community smells in the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained massive popularity in recent years and are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes. However, poorly integrating them in source code may undermine software system quality.…
This paper illustrates an empirical study of the working efficiency of machine learning techniques in classifying code review text by semantic meaning. The code review comments from the source control repository in GitHub were extracted for…
Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) intensively rely on event-driven programming: widgets send GUI events, which capture users' interactions, to dedicated objects called controllers. Controllers implement several GUI listeners that handle…
In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…
Block-based programming languages like Scratch enable children to be creative while learning to program. Even though the block-based approach simplifies the creation of programs, learning to program can nevertheless be challenging.…
Software systems naturally evolve, and this evolution often brings design problems that cause system degradation. Architectural smells are typical symptoms of such problems, and several of these smells are related to undesired dependencies…
Elixir is a new functional programming language whose popularity is rising in the industry. However, there are few works in the literature focused on studying the internal quality of systems implemented in this language. Particularly, to…
The accuracy reported for code smell-detecting tools varies depending on the dataset used to evaluate the tools. Our survey of 45 existing datasets reveals that the adequacy of a dataset for detecting smells highly depends on relevant…
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,…