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Technical debt has become a common metaphor for the accumulation of software design and implementation choices that seek fast initial gains but that are under par and counterproductive in the long run. However, as a metaphor, technical debt…

Platforms like Stack Overflow and GitHub's gist system promote the sharing of ideas and programming techniques via the distribution of code snippets designed to illustrate particular tasks. Python, a popular and fast-growing programming…

Context: A substantial amount of work has been done to detect smells in source code using metrics-based and heuristics-based methods. Machine learning methods have been recently applied to detect source code smells; however, the current…

Traditionally, energy efficiency research has focused on reducing energy consumption at the hardware level and, more recently, in the design and coding phases of the software development life cycle. However, software testing's impact on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential to enhance software development through automated code generation and refactoring, reducing development time and improving code quality. This study empirically evaluates StarCoder2, an LLM…

In open-source projects, anyone can contribute, so it is important to have an active continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in addition to a protocol for reporting security concerns, especially in projects that are…

Software testing is a critical activity to ensure that software complies with its specification. However, current software testing activities tend not to be completely effective when applied in specific software domains in Virtual Reality…

GitHub is one of the most widely used public code development platform. However, the code hosted publicly on the platform is vulnerable to commit spoofing that allows an adversary to introduce malicious code or commits into the repository…

Measuring and evaluating source code similarity is a fundamental software engineering activity that embraces a broad range of applications, including but not limited to code recommendation, duplicate code, plagiarism, malware, and smell…

Developers need to make a constant effort to improve the quality of their code if they want to stay productive. Tools that highlight code locations that could benefit from refactoring are thus highly desirable. The most common name for such…

Researchers apply machine-learning techniques for code smell detection to counter the subjectivity of many code smells. Such approaches need a large, manually annotated dataset for training and benchmarking. Existing literature offers a few…

Developers often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…

Tile-based programming frameworks are increasingly adopted to write high-performance GPU kernels in domains such as deep learning and scientific computing. While these frameworks enhance productivity and hardware utilization, their…

The rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly realised through Machine Learning (ML) pipelines that integrate data preprocessing, model training, evaluation scripts, and configuration-heavy experimentation code. In…

Best testing practices state that tests should verify a single functionality or behavior of the system. Tests that verify multiple behaviors are harder to understand, lack focus, and are more coupled to the production code. An attempt to…

Refactoring is one of the most important activities in software engineering which is used to improve the quality of a software system. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, researchers are attempting to apply deep learning…

We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…

GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…

Bad requirements quality can cause expensive consequences during the software development lifecycle, especially if iterations are long and feedback comes late. %-- the faster a problem is found, the cheaper it is to fix. This makes explicit…

Throughout 2021, GitGuardian's monitoring of public GitHub repositories revealed a two-fold increase in the number of secrets (database credentials, API keys, and other credentials) exposed compared to 2020, accumulating more than six…