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Background: Developers spend a lot of their time on understanding source code. Static code analysis tools can draw attention to code that is difficult for developers to understand. However, most of the findings are based on non-validated…

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…

Understanding and effectively managing Technical Debt (TD) remains a vital challenge in software engineering. While many studies on code-level TD have been published, few illustrate the business impact of low-quality source code. In this…

Context: Designing software is an activity in which software developers think and make design decisions that shape the structure and behavior of software products. Designing software is one of the least understood software engineering…

The importance of programming education has lead to dedicated educational programming environments, where users visually arrange block-based programming constructs that typically control graphical, interactive game-like programs. The…

Context: Social debt describes the accumulation of unforeseen project costs (or potential costs) from sub-optimal software development processes. Community smells are sociotechnical anti-patterns and one source of social debt that impact…

This study explores the intricate relationship between sentiment analysis (SA) and code quality within machine learning (ML) projects, illustrating how the emotional dynamics of developers affect the technical and functional attributes of…

Understanding how novices reason about coding at a neurological level has implications for training the next generation of software engineers. In recent years, medical imaging has been increasingly employed to investigate patterns of neural…

Labels on platforms such as GitHub support triage and coordination, yet little is known about how well they align with code modifications or how such alignment affects collaboration across contributor experience levels. We present a case…

Understanding collaboration patterns in introductory programming courses is essential, as teamwork is a critical skill in computer science. In professional environments, software development relies on effective teamwork, navigating diverse…

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,…

Pre-trained models of source code have gained widespread popularity in many code intelligence tasks. Recently, with the scaling of the model and corpus size, large language models have shown the ability of in-context learning (ICL). ICL…

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…

Cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) have gained popularity due to their low cost and elasticity. However, like other software, SaaS applications suffer from code smells, which can drastically affect functionality and resource usage.…

Code style is an aesthetic choice exhibited in source code that reflects programmers individual coding habits. This study is the first to investigate whether code style can be used as an indicator to identify good programmers. Data from…

Automated deployment and management of Cloud applications relies on descriptions of their deployment topologies, often referred to as Infrastructure Code. As the complexity of applications and their deployment models increases, developers…

The phenomenon of architecture erosion can negatively impact the maintenance and evolution of software systems, and manifest in a variety of symptoms during software development. While erosion is often considered rather late, its symptoms…

Block-based programming languages enable young learners to quickly implement fun programs and games. The Scratch programming environment is particularly successful at this, with more than 50 million registered users at the time of this…

Software is constantly changing, requiring developers to perform several derived tasks in a timely manner, such as writing a description for the intention of the code change, or identifying the defect-prone code changes. Considering that…

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…