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Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

We investigated how programmers express high-level concepts such as path names and coordinates using primitive data types. While relying too much on primitive data types is sometimes criticized as a bad smell, it is still a common practice…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential to enhance software development through automated code generation and refactoring, reducing development time and improving code quality. This study empirically evaluates StarCoder2, an LLM…

While code review is central to the software development process, it can be tedious and expensive to carry out. In this paper, we investigate whether and how Large Language Models (LLMs) can aid with code reviews. Our investigation focuses…

Refactorings are transformations to improve the code design without changing overall functionality and observable behavior. During the refactoring process of smelly test code, practitioners may struggle to identify refactoring candidates…

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…

Traditionally, energy efficiency research has focused on reducing energy consumption at the hardware level and, more recently, in the design and coding phases of the software development life cycle. However, software testing's impact on…

We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…

This study explores the intricate relationship between sentiment analysis (SA) and code quality within machine learning (ML) projects, illustrating how the emotional dynamics of developers affect the technical and functional attributes of…

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…

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…

Creating programs with block-based programming languages like Scratch is easy and fun. Block-based programs can nevertheless contain bugs, in particular when learners have misconceptions about programming. Even when they do not, Scratch…

Existing evaluation benchmarks of language models of code (code LMs) focus almost exclusively on whether the LMs can generate functionally-correct code. In real-world software engineering, developers think beyond functional correctness.…

In recent years, software engineers have explored ways to assist quantum software programmers. Our goal in this paper is to continue this exploration and see if quantum software programmers deal with some problems plaguing classical…

Context: Security smells are recurring coding patterns that are indicative of security weakness, and require further inspection. As infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts, such as Ansible and Chef scripts, are used to provision cloud-based…

Test smells reduce test suite reliability and complicate maintenance. While many methods detect test smells, few support automated removal, and most rely on static analysis or machine learning. This study evaluates models with relatively…

Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results for software engineering applications, but still struggle with code reasoning tasks such as vulnerability detection (VD). We introduce ConceptCoder, a fine-tuning method that…

When teaching Programming and Software Engineering in Bachelor's Degree programs, the emphasis on creating functional software projects often overshadows the focus on software quality, a trend that aligns with ACM curricula recommendations.…

Test smells indicate poor development practices in test code, reducing maintainability and reliability. While developers often struggle to prevent or refactor these issues, existing tools focus primarily on detection rather than automated…