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CI/CD practices play a significant role during collaborative software development by automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as testing, building, quality checking, dependency and security management. GitHub Actions, the CI/CD…

Logging plays a central role in ensuring reproducibility, observability, and reliability in machine learning (ML) systems. While logging is generally considered a good engineering practice, poorly designed logging can negatively affect…

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…

Context: Logging is an important part of modern software projects; logs are used in several tasks such as debugging and testing. Due to the complex nature of logging, it remains a difficult task with several pitfalls that could have serious…

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…

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…

CONTEXT: There has been a rapid growth in the use of data analytics to underpin evidence-based software engineering. However the combination of complex techniques, diverse reporting standards and poorly understood underlying phenomena are…

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…

High data quality is fundamental for today's AI-based systems. However, although data quality has been an object of research for decades, there is a clear lack of research on potential data quality issues (e.g., ambiguous, extraneous…

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…

Continuous Integration (CI) provides early feedback by automatically building software, but long build durations can hinder developer productivity. CI services use caching to speed up builds by reusing infrequently changing artifacts, yet…

Background. Containerization technologies are widely adopted in the DevOps workflow. The most commonly used one is Docker, which requires developers to define a specification file (Dockerfile) to build the image used for creating…

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…

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,…

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…

Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) enable software developers and managers to collect and resolve issues collaboratively. While researchers have extensively analysed ITS data to automate or assist specific activities such as issue assignments,…

In this paper, we focus on studying duplicate logging statements, which are logging statements that have the same static text message. We manually studied over 4K duplicate logging statements and their surrounding code in five large-scale…

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 Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in code-related tasks. However, most research focuses on improving the output quality of LLMs (e.g., correctness), and less attention has been paid to the LLM input (e.g.,…

Software design smells are design attributes which violate the fundamental design principles. Design smells are a key cause of design debt. Although the activities of design smell identification and measurement are predominantly considered…