Related papers: Software Supply Chain Smells: Lightweight Analysis…

Code Smell, similar to a bad smell, is a surface indication of something tainted but in terms of software writing practices. This metric is an indication of a deeper problem lies within the code and is associated with an issue which is…

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…

Background: The Node Package Manager (npm) ecosystem plays a vital role in modern software development by providing a vast repository of packages and tools that developers can use to implement their software systems. However, recent…

Software systems have grown as an indispensable commodity used across various industries, and almost all essential services depend on them for effective operation. The software is no longer an independent or stand-alone piece of code…

Code review that detects and locates defects and other quality issues plays an important role in software quality control. One type of issue that may impact the quality of software is code smells. Yet, little is known about the extent to…

Build scripts automate the process of compiling source code, managing dependencies, running tests, and packaging software into deployable artifacts. These scripts are ubiquitous in modern software development pipelines for streamlining…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate software artifacts, such as source code, tests, and trace links. Requirements play a central role in shaping the input prompts that guide LLMs, as they are often used as part of…

The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…

Much of the success of modern software development can be attributed to code reuse. The ability to reuse existing functionality via third-party dependencies has enabled massive gains in productivity, but for a long time the dominant…

Test smells are defined as sub-optimal design choices developers make when implementing test cases. Hence, similar to code smells, the research community has produced numerous test smell detection tools to investigate the impact of test…

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,…

The NPM package repository contains over two million packages and serves tens of billions of downloads per-week. Nearly every single JavaScript application uses the NPM package manager to install packages from the NPM repository. NPM relies…

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,…

Package managers have become a vital part of the modern software development process. They allow developers to reuse third-party code, share their own code, minimize their codebase, and simplify the build process. However, recent reports…

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…

Community smells are negative patterns in software development teams' interactions that impede their ability to successfully create software. Examples are team members working in isolation, lack of communication and collaboration across…

During software development, poor design and implementation choices can detrimentally impact software maintainability. Design smells, recurring patterns of poorly designed fragments, signify these issues. Role-stereotypes denote the generic…

Recent high-profile incidents in open-source software have greatly raised practitioner attention on software supply chain attacks. To guard against potential malicious package updates, security practitioners advocate pinning dependency to…

Protecting software supply chains from malicious packages is paramount in the evolving landscape of software development. Attacks on the software supply chain involve attackers injecting harmful software into commonly used packages or…

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,…