Automated Detection of Code Smells for Machine Learning Applications

The popularity of machine learning has wildly expanded in recent years. Machine learning techniques have been heatedly studied in academia and applied in the industry to create business value. However, there is a lack of guidelines for code quality in machine learning applications. Although machine learning code is usually integrated as a small...

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,...

'Project smells' - Experiences in Analysing the Software Quality of ML Projects with mllint

Machine Learning (ML) projects incur novel challenges in their development and productionisation over traditional software applications, though established principles and best practices in ensuring the project's software quality still apply. While using static analysis to catch code smells has been shown to improve software quality attributes...

Code Smells & Software Quality in Machine Learning Projects

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are pervasive in the current computer science landscape. Yet, there still exists a lack of Software Engineering (SE) experience and best practices in this field. One such best practice, static code analysis, can be used to find code smells, i.e., (potential) defects in the source code,...

Enabling domain experts to participate in the process of improving software quality using change impact analysis

Software engineers often lack the domain knowledge needed to validate context specific parts of software. Domain experts do have this knowledge needed to validate the software, but often lack the expertise and tools to apply this knowledge in a way that tests the software product. Based on a case study at business-software company Exact, this...

The application perspective of mutatoin testing

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate, improve and extend the applicability of mutation testing. To seek the potential directions of how to improve and extend the applicability of mutation testing, we have started with a systematic literature review on the current state of how mutation testing is applied. The results from the systematic...

Revisiting Test Smells in Automatically Generated Tests: Limitations, Pitfalls, and Opportunities

Test smells attempt to capture design issues in test code that reduce their maintainability. Previous work found such smells to be highly common in automatically generated test-cases, but based this result on specific static detection rules; although these are based on the original definition of “test smells”, a recent empirical study showed...

Releasing Fast and Slow: Characterizing Rapid Releases in a Large Software-Driven Organization

The appeal of delivering new features faster has led many software projects to change their development processes towards rapid release models. Even though rapid releases are increasingly being adopted in open-source and commercial software, it is not well understood what the effects are of this practice. This thesis presents an exploratory case...

Releasing Fast and Slow: An Exploratory Case Study at ING

The appeal of delivering new features faster has led many software projects to adopt rapid releases. However, it is not well understood what the effects of this practice are. This paper presents an exploratory case study of rapid releases at ING, a large banking company that develops software solutions in-house, to characterize rapid releases....

On the Effectiveness of Automatically Inferred Invariants in Detecting Regression Faults in Spreadsheets

Automatically inferred invariants have been found to be successful in detecting regression faults in traditional software, but their application has not been explored in the context of spreadsheets. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of automatically inferred invariants in detecting regression faults in spreadsheets. We conduct an...

Modeling the Exception Flow in PHP Systems

The goal of this thesis is to learn how exception handling constructs are used by PHP developers. We present an approach for detecting the exception flow of a software system, based on the work of Robillard and Murphy (2003). We show the accuracy of this approach by evaluating the tool on a corpus of three different PHP systems. The approach is...

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Classifying Code Comments in Java Open-Source Software Systems

Code comments are a key software component containing information about the underlying implementation. Several studies have shown that code comments enhance the readability of the code. Nevertheless, not all the comments have the same goal and target audience. In this paper, we investigate how six diverse Java OSS projects use code comments,...

A Light-weight Sanity Check for Implemented Architectures

Architecture evaluations offer many benefits, including the early detection of problems and a better understanding of the possibilities of a system. Although many methods are available to evaluate an architecture, studies have shown that the adoption of architecture evaluations in industry is low. A reason for this lack of adoption is that there...

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...

Measuring Quality Improvements After Stimulating Software Quality Awareness Among Developers

Software systems are getting larger and more complex. It takes therefore more time and money to maintain these systems. The maintenance effort is strongly related to the quality of the implementation during the development phase. Providing qualitative numbers to developers about their previous im- plementations could help increase the quality of...

Investigation of the impact of cohesion on the change-proneness of Java interfaces

A lack of cohesion is often associated with bad software quality, and could lead to more changes and bugs in software. In this thesis the impact of cohesion on the change-proneness of Java interfaces is investigated. Showing the existence of a relation between these concepts can lead to better change prediction models that can support software...