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Toward a Smell-aware Bug Prediction Model

Palomba, F. (author), Zanoni, Marco (author), Arcelli Fontana, Francesca (author), De Lucia, Andrea (author), Oliveto, Rocco (author)

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Previous studies empirically assessed the impact of smells on code quality and clearly indicate their negative impact on maintainability, including a higher bug-proneness of components affected by code smells. In this paper, we capture previous findings on bug-proneness to...

journal article 2019

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Discovering Community Patterns in Open-Source: A Systematic Approach and Its Evaluation

Tamburri, Damian A. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Serebrenik, Alexander (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author)

“There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.” - [M. Scott Peck]<br/><br/>The open-source phenomenon has reached the point in which it is virtually impossible to find large applications that do not rely on it. Such grand adoption may...

journal article 2019

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On the Impact of Code Smells on the Energy Consumption of Mobile Applications

Palomba, F. (author), Di Nucci, D. (author), Panichella, A. (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), De Lucia, Andrea (author)

Context. The demand for green software design is steadily growing higher especially in the context of mobile devices, where the computation is often limited by battery life. Previous studies found how wrong programming solutions have a strong impact on the energy consumption. Objective. Despite the efforts spent so far, only a little knowledge...

journal article 2019

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Fine-grained just-in-time defect prediction

Pascarella, L. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Defect prediction models focus on identifying defect-prone code elements, for example to allow practitioners to allocate testing resources on specific subsystems and to provide assistance during code reviews. While the research community has been highly active in proposing metrics and methods to predict defects on long-term periods (i.e.,at...

journal article 2019

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How the Experience of Development Teams Relates to Assertion Density of Test Classes

Catolino, G. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), Ferrucci, Filomena (author)

The impact of developers' experience on several development practices has been widely investigated in the past. One of the most promising research fields is software testing, as many researchers found significant correlations between developers' experience and testing effectiveness. In this paper, we aim at further studying this relation, by...

conference paper 2019

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Test-Driven Code Review: An Empirical Study

Spadini, D. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Baum, Tobias (author), Hanenberg, Stefan (author), Bruntink, Magiel (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Test-Driven Code Review (TDR) is a code review practice in which a reviewer inspects a patch by examining the changed test code before the changed production code. Although this practice has been mentioned positively by practitioners in informal literature and interviews, there is no systematic knowledge of its effects, prevalence, problems, and...

conference paper 2019

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Improving Change Prediction Models with Code Smell-Related Information

Catolino, G. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Arcelli Fontana, Francesca (author), De Lucia, Andrea (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), Ferrucci, Filomena (author)

Code smells are sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers that have the effect of negatively impacting, among others, the change-proneness of the affected classes. Based on this consideration, in this paper we conjecture that code smell-related information can be effectively exploited to improve the performance of change...

journal article 2019

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Not all bugs are the same: Understanding, characterizing, and classifying bug types

Catolino, G. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), Ferrucci, Filomena (author)

Modern version control systems, e.g., GitHub, include bug tracking mechanisms that developers can use to highlight the presence of bugs. This is done by means of bug reports, i.e., textual descriptions reporting the problem and the steps that led to a failure. In past and recent years, the research community deeply investigated methods for...

journal article 2019

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Information Needs in Contemporary Code Review

Pascarella, L. (author), Spadini, D. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Bruntink, Magiel (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Contemporary code review is a widespread practice used by software engineers to maintain high software quality and share project knowledge. However, conducting proper code review takes time and developers often have limited time for review. In this paper, we aim at investigating the information that reviewers need<br/>to conduct a proper code...

journal article 2018

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Re-evaluating Method-Level Bug Prediction

Pascarella, L. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Bug prediction is aimed at supporting developers in the identification of code artifacts more likely to be defective. Researchers have proposed prediction models to identify bug prone methods and provided promising evidence that it is possible to operate at this level of granularity. Particularly, models based on a mixture of product and process...

conference paper 2018

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The Scent of a Smell: An Extensive Comparison between Textual and Structural Smells

Palomba, F. (author), Panichella, A. (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), Oliveto, Rocco (author), De Lucia, Andrea (author)

Code smells are symptoms of poor design or implementation choices that have a negative effect on several aspects of software maintenance and evolution, such as program comprehension or change- and fault-proneness. This is why researchers have spent a lot of effort on devising methods that help developers to automatically detect them in source...

journal article 2018

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Mining File Histories: Should we consider branches?

Kovalenko, V.V. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Modern distributed version control systems, such as Git, offer support for branching — the possibility to develop parts of software outside the master trunk. Consideration of the repository structure in Mining Software Repository (MSR) studies requires a thorough approach to mining, but there is no well-documented, widespread methodology...

conference paper 2018

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Enhancing Change Prediction Models using Developer-Related Factors

Catolino, G. (author), Palomba, F. (author), De Lucia, Andrea (author), Ferrucci, Filomena (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author)

Continuous changes applied during software maintenance risk to deteriorate the structure of a system and are a threat to its maintainability. In this context, predicting the portions of source code where specific maintenance operations should be focused on may be crucial for developers to prevent maintainability issues. Previous work proposed...

journal article 2018

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Context Is King: The Developer Perspective on the Usage of Static Analysis Tools

Vassalo, Carmine (author), Panichella, Sebastiano (author), Palomba, F. (author), Proksch, Sebastian (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), Gall, Harald C. (author)

conference paper 2018

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A Graph-based Dataset of Commit History of Real-World Android apps

Geiger, Franz-Xaver (author), Malavolta, Ivano (author), Pascarella, L. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Di Nucci, D. (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Obtaining a good dataset to conduct empirical studies on the engineering of Android apps is an open challenge. To start tackling this challenge, we present AndroidTimeMachine, the first, self-contained, publicly available dataset weaving spread-out data sources about real-world, open-source Android apps. Encoded as a graph-based database,...

conference paper 2018

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Self-Reported Activities of Android Developers

Pascarella, L. (author), Geiger, Franz-Xaver (author), Palomba, F. (author), Di Nucci, Dario (author), Malavolta, Ivano (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

To gain a deeper empirical understanding of how developers work on Android apps, we investigate self-reported activities of Android developers and to what extent these activities can be classified with machine learning techniques. To this aim, we firstly create a taxonomy of self-reported activities coming from the manual analysis of 5,000...

conference paper 2018

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How Is Video Game Development Different from Software Development in Open Source?

Pascarella, L. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Di Penta, Massimiliano (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Recent research has provided evidence that, in the industrial context, developing video games diverges from developing software systems in other domains, such as office suites and system utilities. In this paper, we consider video game development in the open source system (OSS) context. Specifically, we investigate how developers contribute to...

conference paper 2018

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On The Relation of Test Smells to Software Code Quality

Spadini, D. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), Bruntink, Magiel (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Test smells are sub-optimal design choices in the implementation of test code. As reported by recent studies, their presence might not only negatively affect the comprehension of test suites but can also lead to test cases being less effective in finding bugs in production code. Although significant steps toward understanding test smells, there...

conference paper 2018

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How Do Community Smells Influence Code Smells?

Palomba, F. (author), Tamburri, Damian (author), Serebrenik, Alexander (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), Arcelli Fontana, Francesca (author), Oliveto, Rocco (author)

conference paper 2018

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Automatic Test Smell Detection using Information Retrieval Techniques

Palomba, F. (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), De Lucia, Andrea (author)

Software testing is a key activity to control the reliability of production code. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of test cases can be threatened by the presence of faults. Recent work showed that static indicators can be exploited to identify testrelated issues. In particular test smells, i.e., sub-optimal design choices applied by developers...

conference paper 2018