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Background. Developers use Automated Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) to control for potential quality issues in source code, including defects and technical debt. Tool vendors have devised quite a number of tools, which makes it harder for…

With an ever-increasing amount of open source software, the popularity of services like GitHub that facilitate code reuse, and common misconceptions about the licensing of open source software, the problem of license violations in the code…

As an alternative to Java, Kotlin has gained rapid popularity since its introduction and has become the default choice for developing Android apps. However, due to its interoperability with Java, Kotlin programs may contain almost the same…

Context. Companies commonly invest effort to remove technical issues believed to impact software qualities, such as removing anti-patterns or coding styles violations. Objective. Our aim is to analyze the diffuseness of Technical Debt (TD)…

Concurrency has been rapidly gaining importance in general-purpose computing, caused by the recent turn towards multicore processing architectures. As a result, an increasing number of developers have to learn to write concurrent programs,…

To ensure the quality of software systems, software engineers can make use of a variety of quality assurance approaches, such as software testing, modern code review, automated static analysis, and build automation. Each of these quality…

Code readability and software complexity are important software quality metrics that impact other software metrics such as maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability. This paper presents an empirical study of the…

Context: Downloading the source code of open-source Java projects and building them on a local computer using Maven, Gradle, or Ant is a common activity performed by researchers and practitioners. Multiple studies so far found that about…

In this paper, we describe and present the first dataset of source code plagiarism specifically aimed at contest plagiarism. The dataset contains 251 pairs of plagiarized solutions of competitive programming tasks in Java, as well as 660…

Android is nowadays the most popular operating system in the world, not only in the realm of mobile devices, but also when considering desktop and laptop computers. Such a popularity makes it an attractive target for security attacks, also…

Modern programming languages, such as Java and C#, typically provide features that handle exceptions. These features separate error-handling code from regular source code and are proven to enhance the practice of software reliability,…

Runtime introspection of dependencies, i.e., the ability to observe which dependencies are currently used during program execution, is fundamental for Software Supply Chain security. Yet, Java has no support for it. We solve this problem…

This study examines the impact of tokenized Java code length on the accuracy and explicitness of ten major LLMs in vulnerability detection. Using chi-square tests and known ground truth, we found inconsistencies across models: some, like…

Bug-fix benchmarks are essential for evaluating methodologies in automatic program repair (APR) and fault localization (FL). However, existing benchmarks, exemplified by Defects4J, need to evolve to incorporate recent bug-fixes aligned with…

The Java libraries JCA and JSSE offer cryptographic APIs to facilitate secure coding. When developers misuse some of the APIs, their code becomes vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To eliminate such vulnerabilities, people built tools to detect…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

Context: Software development projects increasingly adopt unit testing as a way to identify and correct program faults early in the construction process. Code that is unit tested should therefore have fewer failures associated with it.…

In managed languages, serialization of objects is typically done in bespoke binary formats such as Protobuf, or markup languages such as XML or JSON. The major limitation of these formats is readability. Human developers cannot read binary…

Open-source software supply chain security relies heavily on assessing affected versions of library vulnerabilities. While prior studies have leveraged exploits for verifying vulnerability affected versions, they point out a key limitation…

Programming education should aim to provide students with a broad range of skills that they will later use while developing software. An important aspect in this is their ability to write code that is not only correct but also of high…