The Slow and The Furious? Performance Antipattern Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) have gained traction in recent years. A major non-functional quality of CPS is performance since it affects both usability and security. This critical quality attribute depends on the specialized hardware, simulation engines, and environmental factors that characterize the system under analysis. While a large body...

Test Smells 20 Years Later: Detectability, Validity, and Reliability

Test smells aim to capture design issues in test code that reduces its maintainability. These have been extensively studied and generally found quite prevalent in both human-written and automatically generated test-cases. However, most evidence of prevalence is based on specific static detection rules. Although those are based on the original,...

Enabling Log Recommendation Through Machine Learning on Source Code

Logging is a common practice in software development that assists developers with the maintenance of software. Logging a system optimally is a challenging task, thus Li et al. have proposed a state-of-the-art log recommendation model. However, no further attempts exist to improve the model or reproduce their results using different training data...

Fixing vulnerabilities potentially hinders maintainability

Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the maintainability of their codebases when patching vulnerabilities. This paper evaluates the impact of patches to...

Language-agnostic Incremental Code Clone Detection

Code duplication is a form of technical debt frequently observed in software systems. Its existence negatively affects the maintainability of a system in numerous ways. In order to tackle the issues that come with it, various automated clone detection techniques have been proposed throughout the years. However, the vast majority of them operate...

An Empirical Catalog of Code Smells for the Presentation Layer of Android Apps

Software developers, including those of the Android mobile platform, constantly seek to improve their applications’ maintainability and evolvability. Code smells are commonly used for this purpose, as they indicate symptoms of design problems. However, although the literature presents a variety of code smells, such as God Class and Long...

Code smells for Model-View-Controller architectures

Previous studies have shown the negative effects that low-quality code can have on maintainability proxies, such as code change- and defect-proneness. One of the symptoms for low-quality code are code smells, defined as sub-optimal implementation choices. While this definition is quite general and seems to suggest a wide spectrum of smells that...

Why and How JavaScript Developers Use Linters

Automatic static analysis tools help developers to automatically spot code issues in their software. They can be of extreme value in languages with dynamic characteristics, such as JavaScript, where developers can easily introduce mistakes which can go unnoticed for a long time, e.g., a simple syntactic or spelling mistake. Although research has...

A Validated Set of Smells in Model-View-Controller Architectures

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices that may hinder code comprehension, and possibly increase change-and defect-proneness. A vast catalogue of smells has been defined in the literature, and it includes smells that can be found in any kind of system (e.g., God Classes), regardless of their architecture. On the other...

Web Service Growing Pains: Understanding Services and Their Clients

At an implementation level, web services serve the basic purpose of message exchange between potentially heterogeneous software systems. Through abstracting language- and platform-specific implementations into text-based, human-readable XML and JSON-based formats, different software systems are able to execute procedures and retrieve data from...

Can We Predict Types of Code Changes? An Empirical Analysis

Preprint of paper published in: 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2-3 June 2012; doi:10.1109/MSR.2012.6224284 There exist many approaches that help in pointing developers to the change-prone parts of a software system. Although beneficial, they mostly fall short in providing details of these changes. Fine-grained...

Dead code elimination for web applications written in dynamic languages

Dead code is source code that is not necessary for the correct execution of an application. Dead code is a result of software ageing. It is a threat for maintainability and should therefore be removed. Many organizations in the web domain have the problem that their software grows and demands increasingly more effort to maintain, test, check out...

Aiding Software Developers to Test with TestNForce

Regression testing is an expensive process because, most of times, all the available test cases are executed. Many techniques of test selection/filtering have been researched and implemented, each having its own strong and weak points. This paper introduces a tool that helps developers and testers to identify the tests that need to be executed...

Understanding Ajax Applications by using Trace Analysis

Ajax is an umbrella term for a set of technologies that allows web developers to create highly interactive web applications. Ajax applications are complex; they consist of multiple heterogeneous artifacts which are combined in a highly dynamic fashion. This complexity makes Ajax applications hard to understand, and thus to maintain. For this...

Software maintenance in a data distribution service with complex event processing

This thesis covers the topic of software maintenance on a system which consists of a Data Distribution Service (DDS) and a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine. Software maintenance on this system is hard to perform, because of the dependencies between the different components. This thesis answers the main research question: ”To which extent do...

Evaluating Dynamic Analysis Techniques for Program Comprehension

Program comprehension is an essential part of software development and software maintenance, as software must be sufficiently understood before it can be properly modified. One of the common approaches in getting to understand a program is the study of its execution, also known as dynamic analysis. While many such approaches have been proposed...

JRET: A tool for the reconstruction of sequence diagrams from program executions

As opposed to static analysis, in which source code is inspected in order to increase program understanding, dynamic analysis concerns the actual execution of a program and the collection of runtime data. Several strategies to retrieve dynamic information exist, including source code instrumentation and the use of a customized debugger. Since...

Studying Co-evolution of Production and Test Code Using Association Rule Mining

Unit testing is generally accepted as an aid to produce high quality code, and can provide quick feedback to developers on the quality of the software. To have a high quality and well maintained test suite requires the production and test code to synchronously co-evolve, as added or changed production code should be tested as soon as possible....