Related papers: A Causal Perspective on Measuring, Explaining and …

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…

Background: Defect prediction in software can be highly beneficial for development projects, when prediction is highly effective and defect-prone areas are predicted correctly. One of the key elements to gain effective software defect…

The manual generation of test scripts is a time-intensive, costly, and error-prone process, indicating the value of automated solutions. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in this domain, leveraging their extensive…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming software development, the functional quality of generated code has become a central focus, leaving readability, one of critical non-functional attributes, understudied. Given that…

Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…

While a substantial body of prior research has investigated the form and nature of production code, comparatively little attention has examined characteristics of test code, and, in particular, test smells in that code. In this paper, we…

Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want…

In this paper, we present a novel approach to improving software quality and efficiency through a Large Language Model (LLM)-based model designed to review code and identify potential issues. Our proposed LLM-based AI agent model is trained…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is being increasingly used to learn and adapt application behavior in many domains, including large-scale and safety critical systems, as for example, autonomous driving. With the advent of plug-n-play RL…

Context: Security is vital to software developed for commercial or personal use. Although more organizations are realizing the importance of applying secure coding practices, in many of them, security concerns are not known or addressed…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in software engineering to generate, complete, translate, and fix code, improving developer productivity. While most research focuses on the energy consumption and carbon emissions of model…

Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…

Developing test code may be a time-consuming task that usually requires much effort and cost, especially when it is done manually. Besides, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead…

Code comments are important in software development because they directly influence software maintainability and overall quality. Bad practices of code comments lead to code comment smells, negatively impacting software maintenance. Recent…

Simulation modelling systems are routinely used to test or understand real-world scenarios in a controlled setting. They have found numerous applications in scientific research, engineering, and industrial operations. Due to their complex…

This study investigates the reliability of code generation by Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on identifying and analyzing defects in the generated code. Despite the advanced capabilities of LLMs in automating code generation,…

A code smell is a surface indicator of an inherent problem in the system, most often due to deviation from standard coding practices on the developers part during the development phase. Studies observe that code smells made the code more…

Code smells indicate software design problems that harm software quality. Data-intensive systems that frequently access databases often suffer from SQL code smells besides the traditional smells. While there have been extensive studies on…

Code smells are characteristics of the software that indicates a code or design problem which can make software hard to understand, evolve, and maintain. The code smell detection tools proposed in the literature produce different results,…

Mobile apps have become essential of our daily lives, making code quality a critical concern for developers. Behavioural code smells are characteristics in the source code that induce inappropriate code behaviour during execution, which…