Related papers: ROSE: Transformer-Based Refactoring Recommendation…

To remain useful for their users, software systems need to continuously enhance and extend their functionality. Nevertheless, in many object-oriented applications, features are not represented explicitly. The lack of modularization is known…

Software debugging, and program repair are among the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks in software engineering that would benefit a lot from automation. In this paper, we propose a novel automated program repair approach based…

Refactoring is a software engineering practice that aims to improve code quality without altering program behavior. Although automated refactoring tools have been extensively studied, their practical applicability remains limited. Recent…

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…

Test smells can pose difficulties during testing activities, such as poor maintainability, non-deterministic behavior, and incomplete verification. Existing research has extensively addressed test smells in automated software tests but…

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…

Code smells indicate the potential problems of software quality so that developers can identify refactoring opportunities by detecting code smells. State-of-the-art approaches leverage heuristics, machine learning, and deep learning to…

Enhancing the modular structure of existing systems has attracted substantial research interest, focusing on two main methods: (1) software modularization and (2) identifying design issues (e.g., smells) as refactoring opportunities.…

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…

Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…

Pretrained transformer-encoder models like DeBERTaV3 and ModernBERT introduce architectural advancements aimed at improving efficiency and performance. Although the authors of ModernBERT report improved performance over DeBERTaV3 on several…

Code quality is and will be a crucial factor while developing new software code, requiring appropriate tools to ensure functional and reliable code. Machine learning techniques are still rarely used for software engineering tools, missing…

Determining the most effective Large Language Model for code smell detection presents a complex challenge. This study introduces a structured methodology and evaluation matrix to tackle this issue, leveraging a curated dataset of code…

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…

Of the factors that determines the quality of a software system is its design and architecture. Having a good and clear design and architecture allows the system to evolve (plan and add new features), be easier to comprehend, easier to…

This paper presents an analysis of the architectural design of two distributed open source systems (OSS) developed in Java: Distributed Modular Audio Recognition Framework (DMARF) and General Intensional Programming System (GIPSY). The…

Reverse Engineering(RE) has been a fundamental task in software engineering. However, most of the traditional Java reverse engineering tools are strictly rule defined, thus are not fault-tolerant, which pose serious problem when noise and…

Cohesion is a core design quality that has a great impact on posterior development and maintenance. By the nature of software, the cohesion of a system is diminished as the system evolves. God classes are code defects resulting from…

Although Extract Method is a key refactoring for improving program comprehension, refactoring tools for such purpose are often underused. To address this shortcoming, we present JExtract, a recommendation system based on structural…

Software process models are essential to facilitate collaboration and communication among software teams to solve complex development tasks. Inspired by these software engineering practices, we present FlowGen - a code generation framework…