Related papers: Software Supply Chain Smells: Lightweight Analysis…

Python is widely adopted across various domains, especially in Machine Learning (ML) and traditional software projects. Despite its versatility, Python is susceptible to performance smells, i.e., suboptimal coding practices that can reduce…

Context. The adoption of Machine Learning (ML)--enabled systems is steadily increasing. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of ML-specific quality assurance approaches, possibly because of the limited knowledge of how quality-related concerns…

The software product is a source of cyber-attacks that target organizations by using their software supply chain as a distribution vector. As the reliance of software projects on open-source or proprietary modules is increasing drastically,…

JavaScript has been consistently among the most popular programming languages in the past decade. However, its dynamic, weakly-typed, and asynchronous nature can make it challenging to write maintainable code for developers without in-depth…

Modern software systems are often built by leveraging code written by others in the form of libraries and packages to accelerate their development. While there are many benefits to using third-party packages, software projects often become…

Automated deployment and management of Cloud applications relies on descriptions of their deployment topologies, often referred to as Infrastructure Code. As the complexity of applications and their deployment models increases, developers…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are pervasive in the current computer science landscape. Yet, there still exists a lack of software engineering experience and best practices in this field. One such best practice,…

Library dependencies in software ecosystems play a crucial role in the development of software. As newer releases of these libraries are published, developers may opt to pin their dependencies to a particular version. While pinning may have…

Fault-proneness is an indication of programming errors that decreases software quality and maintainability. On the contrary, code smell is a symptom of potential design problems which has impact on fault-proneness. In the literature,…

The low cost and rapid provisioning capabilities have made open-source cloud a desirable platform to launch industrial applications. However, as open-source cloud moves towards maturity, it still suffers from quality issues like code…

Requirements form the basis for defining software systems' obligations and tasks. Testable requirements help prevent failures, reduce maintenance costs, and make it easier to perform acceptance tests. However, despite the importance of…

Code smells are symptoms of potential code quality problems that may affect software maintainability, thus increasing development costs and impacting software reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices, which might hinder comprehension, increase code complexity and fault-proneness and decrease maintainability of software systems. The aim of our study was to perform a…

Modern software systems rely on dependency networks of reusable libraries, where breaking changes propagate and cause downstream consumers to fail. Despite growing research across ecosystems, no comprehensive synthesis exists. We conduct a…

The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to…

Dependencies between modules can trigger ripple effects when changes are made, making maintenance complex and costly, so minimizing these dependencies is crucial. Consequently, understanding what drives dependencies is important. One…

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly become a de facto standard for connecting LLM-based agents with external tools via reusable MCP servers. In practice, however, server selection and onboarding rely heavily on free-text tool…

Community smells appear in sub-optimal software development community structures, causing unforeseen additional project costs, e.g., lower productivity and more technical debt. Previous studies analyzed and predicted community smells in the…

A software supply chain attack is characterized by the injection of malicious code into a software package in order to compromise dependent systems further down the chain. Recent years saw a number of supply chain attacks that leverage the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained massive popularity in recent years and are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes. However, poorly integrating them in source code may undermine software system quality.…