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...

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...

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...