相关论文: A Journey Among Java Neutral Program Variants

A software element defined in one place is typically used in many places. When it is changed, all its occurrences may need to be changed too, which can severely hinder software evolution. This has led to the support of encapsulation in…

Many software development problems can be addressed by program analysis tools, which traditionally are based on precise, logical reasoning and heuristics to ensure that the tools are practical. Recent work has shown tremendous success…

As software pervades more and more areas of our professional and personal lives, there is an ever-increasing need to maintain software and for programmers to efficiently write and understand program code. In the first study of its kind, we…

Mutation testing has been widely accepted as an approach to guide test case generation or to assess the effectiveness of test suites. Empirical studies have shown that mutants are representative of real faults; yet they also indicated a…

Many internal software metrics and external quality attributes of Java programs correlate strongly with program size. This knowledge has been used pervasively in quantitative studies of software through practices such as normalization on…

Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…

To ensure that Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively support user productivity, they need to be adjusted. Existing Code Readability (CR) models can guide this alignment. However, there are concerns about their relevance in modern…

Managing project dependencies is a key maintenance issue in software development. Developers need to choose an update strategy that allows them to receive important updates and fixes while protecting them from breaking changes. Semantic…

Software reliability is a primary concern in the construction of software, and thus a fundamental component in the definition of software quality. Analyzing software reliability requires a specification of the intended behavior of the…

Mutation testing is used extensively to support the experimentation of software engineering studies. Its application to real-world projects is possible thanks to modern tools that automate the whole mutation analysis process. However,…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

Software process lines provide a systematic approach to develop and manage software processes. It defines a reference process containing general process assets, whereas a well-defined customization approach allows process engineers to…

Loop invariants play a central role in the verification of imperative programs. However, finding these invariants is often a difficult and time-consuming task for the programmer. We have previously shown how program transformation can be…

Variable sharing is a fundamental property in the static analysis of logic programs, since it is instrumental for ensuring correctness and increasing precision while inferring many useful program properties. Such properties include modes,…

Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…

Transformer-based models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in many intelligent coding tasks such as code comment generation and code completion. Previous studies show that deep learning models are sensitive to the input…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…

Test smells can pose difficulties during testing activities, such as poor maintainability, non-deterministic behavior, and incomplete verification. Existing research has extensively addressed test smells in automated software tests but…

The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…

Automatic code transformation in which transformations are tuned for specific applications and contexts are difficult to achieve in an accessible manner. In this paper, we present an approach to build application specific code…