Related papers: How Do Code Smells Affect Skill Growth in Scratch …

Code cloning, the duplication of code fragments, is common in software development. While some reuse aids productivity, excessive cloning hurts maintainability and introduces bugs. Hence, automatic code clone detection is vital. Meanwhile,…

Following the rise of large language models (LLMs), many studies have emerged in recent years focusing on exploring the adoption of LLM-based tools for software development by novice developers: computer science/software engineering…

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 adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, wildlife preservation, autonomous driving and criminal justice system calls for a data-centric approach to AI. Data scientists spend the majority of…

Benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) often rely on rubric-scented prompts that request visible reasoning and strict formatting, whereas real deployments demand terse, contract-bound answers. We investigate whether such "evaluation…

Spreadsheet users are often unaware of the risks imposed by poorly designed spreadsheets. One way to assess spreadsheet quality is to detect smells which attempt to identify parts of spreadsheets that are hard to comprehend or maintain and…

Software Interfaces are meant to describe contracts governing interactions between logic modules. Interfaces, if well designed, significantly reduce software complexity and ease maintainability . However, as software evolves, the…

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…

Code review is a mature practice for software quality assurance in software development with which reviewers check the code that has been committed by developers, and verify the quality of code. During the code review discussions, reviewers…

Previous works from research and industry have proposed a spatial representation of code in a canvas, arguing that a navigational code space confers developers the freedom to organise elements according to their understanding. By allowing…

Software systems are getting more complex as the system grows where maintaining such system is a primary concern for the industry. Code clone is one of the factors making software maintenance more difficult. It is a process of replicating…

Context: Several studies investigated the impact of anti-patterns (i.e., "poor" solutions to recurring design problems) during maintenance activities and reported that anti-patterns significantly affect the developers' effort required to…

Cognitive-Driven Development (CDD) is a coding design technique that helps developers focus on designing code within cognitive limits. The imposed limit tends to enhance code readability and maintainability. While early works on CDD focused…

Program text is rendered using impoverished typographic styles. Beyond choice of fonts and syntax-highlighting colors, code editors and related tools utilize very few text decorations. These limited styles are, furthermore, applied in…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various software engineering tasks, including error detection, clone detection, and code translation, primarily leveraging high-resource programming languages like…

In recent years, code intelligence has gained increasing importance in the field of automated software engineering. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

Transitioning from block-based programming to text-based programming environments can be challenging as it requires students to learn new programming language concepts. In this paper, we identify and classify the issues encountered when…

Educating students about software testing practices is integral to the curricula of many computer science-related courses and typically involves students writing unit tests. Similar to production/source code, students might inadvertently…

Community smells are negative patterns in software development teams' interactions that impede their ability to successfully create software. Examples are team members working in isolation, lack of communication and collaboration across…