相关论文: Refactoring Debt: Myth or Reality? An Exploratory …

Context: There is an increase in the investment and development of data-intensive (DI) solutions, systems that manage large amounts of data. Without careful management, this growing investment will also grow associated technical debt (TD).…

Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…

Just-in-time defect prediction (JIT-DP) aims to predict the likelihood of code changes resulting in software defects at an early stage. Although code change metrics and semantic features have enhanced prediction accuracy, prior research has…

Refactoring is a practice widely adopted during software maintenance and evolution. Due to its importance, there is extensive work on the effectiveness of refactoring in achieving code quality. However, developer's intentions are usually…

Code review is a key development practice that contributes to improve software quality and to foster knowledge sharing among developers. However, code review usually takes time and demands detailed and time-consuming analysis of textual…

Managing technical debt (TD) is essential for maintaining long-term software projects. Nonetheless, the time and cost involved in technical debt management (TDM) are often high, which may lead practitioners to omit TDM tasks. The adoption…

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) impairs scientific software (SSW), yet its prioritization, sentiment, persistence, and propagation remains underexplored. Understanding how SSW developers express, and address SATD is crucial for…

Context: Technical Debt (TD) discusses the negative impact of sub-optimal decisions to cope with the need-for-speed in software development. Code Technical Debt Items (TDI) are atomic elements of TD that can be observed in code artefacts.…

Software refactoring plays an important role in software engineering. Developers often turn to refactoring when they want to restructure software to improve its quality without changing its external behavior. Studies show that small-scale…

Context: Contemporary software development is typically conducted in dynamic, resource-scarce environments that are prone to the accumulation of technical debt. While this general phenomenon is acknowledged, what remains unknown is how…

Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the…

Most Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) research utilizes explicit SATD features such as 'TODO' and 'FIXME' for SATD detection. A closer look reveals several SATD research uses simple SATD ('Easy to Find') code comments without the…

The remarkable advances in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled machines to write code, accelerating the growth of software systems. However, the bottleneck in software development is not writing code but understanding it;…

Background: To adequately attend to non-functional requirements (NFRs), they must be documented; otherwise, developers would not know about their existence. However, the documentation of NFRs may be subject to Technical Debt and Waste, as…

Refactoring is the practice of improving software quality without altering its external behavior. Developers intuitively refactor their code for multiple purposes, such as improving program comprehension, reducing code complexity, dealing…

To create unit tests, it may be necessary to refactor the production code, e.g. by widening access to specific methods or by decomposing classes into smaller units that are easier to test independently. We report on an extensive study to…

Static Analysis Tools (SATs) are central to security engineering activities, as they enable early identification of code weaknesses without requiring execution. However, their effectiveness is often limited by high false-positive rates and…

When developers use different keywords such as TODO and FIXME in source code comments to describe self-admitted technical debt (SATD), we refer it as Keyword-Labeled SATD (KL-SATD). We study KL-SATD from 33 software repositories with 13,588…

Large language model (LLM) coding agents can generate working code, but their solutions often accumulate complexity, duplication, and architectural debt. Human developers address such issues through refactoring: behavior-preserving program…

Understanding and effectively managing Technical Debt (TD) remains a vital challenge in software engineering. While many studies on code-level TD have been published, few illustrate the business impact of low-quality source code. In this…