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Architectural Technical Debt (ATD) is considered as the most significant type of TD in industrial practice. In this study, we interview 21 software engineers and architects to investigate a specific type of ATD, namely architectural smells…

Code smells as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Many times they are the result of so called technical debt. Our study showed that the interest in code smells research is increasing. However, most of the publications are…

A smell in software source code denotes an indication of suboptimal design and implementation decisions, potentially hindering the code understanding and, in turn, raising the likelihood of being prone to changes and faults. Identifying…

Software systems naturally evolve, and this evolution often brings design problems that cause system degradation. Architectural smells are typical symptoms of such problems, and several of these smells are related to undesired dependencies…

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…

For Open Source Software (OSS) projects, discussions in Issue Tracking Systems (ITS) serve as a crucial collaboration mechanism for diverse stakeholders. However, these discussions can become lengthy and entangled, making it hard to find…

As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These…

Spreadsheets are commonly used in organizations as a programming tool for business-related calculations and decision making. Since faults in spreadsheets can have severe business impacts, a number of approaches from general software…

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

The popularity of machine learning has wildly expanded in recent years. Machine learning techniques have been heatedly studied in academia and applied in the industry to create business value. However, there is a lack of guidelines for code…

Using open-source dependencies is essential in modern software development. However, this practice implies significant trust in third-party code, while there is little support for developers to assess this trust. As a consequence, attacks…

Machine Learning (ML) projects incur novel challenges in their development and productionisation over traditional software applications, though established principles and best practices in ensuring the project's software quality still…

Architectural decay imposes real costs in terms of developer effort, system correctness, and performance. Over time, those problems are likely to be revealed as explicit implementation issues (defects, feature changes, etc.). Recent…

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become essential for modern software management, yet security flaws in IaC scripts can have severe consequences, as exemplified by the recurring exploits of Cloud Web Services. Prior work has recognized the…

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…

Similarly to production code, code smells also occur in test code, where they are called test smells. Test smells have a detrimental effect not only on test code but also on the production code that is being tested. To date, the majority of…

Software development is a collaborative task. Previous research has shown social aspects within development teams to be highly relevant for the success of software projects. A team's mood has been proven to be particularly important. It is…

Users use Issue Tracking Systems to keep track and manage issue reports in their repositories. An issue is a rich source of software information that contains different reports including a problem, a request for new features, or merely a…

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…

Code samples play a pivotal role in open-source ecosystems (OSSECO), serving as lightweight artifacts that support knowledge transfer, onboarding, and framework adoption. Despite their instructional relevance, these samples are often…