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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…

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 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…

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…

Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…

Despite being an old language feature, Java exception handling code is one of the least understood parts of many systems. Several studies have analyzed the characteristics of exception handling code, trying to identify common practices or…

Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…

With the rapid increasing of software project size and maintenance cost, adherence to coding standards especially by managing identifier naming, is attracting a pressing concern from both computer science educators and software managers.…

Background. Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, and are employed both in open-source and industrial contexts. One of the main goals of code reviews is to find defects in the code, allowing…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…

In this paper, the term formula code refers to fragments of source code that implement a mathematical formula. We present empirical studies that analyze the diversity and frequency of formula code in open-source-software projects. In an…

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without…

In open-source projects, anyone can contribute, so it is important to have an active continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in addition to a protocol for reporting security concerns, especially in projects that are…

TypeScript is a quickly evolving superset of JavaScript with active development of new features. Our paper seeks to understand how quickly these features are adopted by the developer community. Existing work in JavaScript shows the adoption…

Modern programming languages like Java require runtime systems to support the implementation and deployment of software applications in diverse computing platforms and operating systems. These runtime systems are normally developed in…

Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is…

Background: Meeting the growing industry demand for Data Science requires cross-disciplinary teams that can translate machine learning research into production-ready code. Software engineering teams value adherence to coding standards as an…

Cloud computing has become popular thanks to the widespread use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, allowing the community to conveniently manage and configure cloud infrastructure using scripts. However, the scripting process itself…