TODO comments are widely used by developers to remind themselves or others about incomplete tasks. In other words, TODO comments are usually associated with temporary or suboptimal solutions. In practice, all the equivalent suboptimal implementations ...

Software modernization is a common activity in software engineering, since technologies advance, requirements change, and business models evolve. Differently from conventional software evolution (e.g., adding new features, enhancing performance, or ...

What if end users could own the software development life cycle from conception to deployment using only requirements expressed in language, images, video or audio? We explore this idea, building on the capabilities that Generative Artificial Intelligence ...

Existing software clustering techniques tend to ignore prior knowledge from domain experts, leading to results (suggested big-bang remodularization actions) that cannot be acceptable to developers. Incorporating domain experts knowledge or constraints ...

Code evolution is prevalent in software ecosystems, which can provide many benefits, such as new features, bug fixes, security patches, etc., while still introducing breaking changes that make downstream projects fail to work. Breaking changes cause a lot ...

Modern video games are extremely complex software systems and, as such, they might suffer from several types of post-release issues. A particularly insidious issue is constituted by drops in the frame rate (i.e., stuttering events), which might have a ...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have received much recent attention due to their human-level accuracy. While existing works mostly focus on either improving accuracy or testing accuracy robustness, the computation efficiency of LLMs, which is of paramount ...

Technical Debt Management (TDM) can suffer from unpredictability, communication gaps and the inaccessibility of relevant information, which hamper the effectiveness of its decision making. These issues can stem from division among decision-makers which ...

Voice-based virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular. Such systems provide frameworks to developers for building custom apps. End-users can interact with such apps through a Voice User Interface (VUI), which allows the user to use natural ...

Deep learning (DL) frameworks have become the cornerstone of the rapidly developing DL field. Through installation dependencies specified in the distribution metadata, numerous packages directly or transitively depend on DL frameworks, layer after layer, ...

A Dockerfile defines a set of instructions to build Docker images, which can then be instantiated to support containerized applications. Recent studies have revealed a considerable amount of quality issues with Dockerfiles. In this article, we propose a ...

Mocking is an essential unit testing technique for isolating the class under test from its dependencies. Developers often leverage mocking frameworks to develop stub code that specifies the behaviors of mock objects. However, developing and maintaining ...

Many software processes advocate that the test code should co-evolve with the production code. Prior work usually studies such co-evolution based on production-test co-evolution samples mined from software repositories. A production-test co-evolution ...

Deep learning (DL) is a really active topic in recent years. Code cloning is a common code implementation that could negatively impact software maintenance. For DL software, developers rely heavily on frameworks to implement DL features. Meanwhile, to ...

Code comments are one of the important documents to help developers review and comprehend source code. In recent studies, researchers have proposed many deep learning models to generate the method header comments (i.e., method comment), which have ...

Modern software systems are complex, and they heavily rely on external libraries developed by different teams and organizations. Such systems suffer from higher instability due to incompatibility issues caused by library upgrades. In this article, we ...

Complex software systems have a network of dependencies. Developers often configure package managers (e.g., npm) to automatically update dependencies with each publication of new releases containing bug fixes and new features. When a dependency release ...

Video games represent a substantial and increasing share of the software market. However, their development is particularly challenging as it requires multi-faceted knowledge, which is not consolidated in computer science education yet. This article aims ...

Due to the exploratory nature of computational notebook development, a notebook can be extensively evolved even though it is small, potentially incurring substantial technical debt. Indeed, in interview studies notebook authors have attested to performing ...

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers to seek programming-related information. More and more developers use Community Question and Answer forums, such as Stack Overflow, to search for code examples of how to accomplish a certain ...