Anthony Peruma

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Scientific software-defined as computer programs, scripts, or code used in scientific research, data analysis, modeling, or simulation-has become central to modern research. However, there is limited research on the readability and understandability of scientific code, both of which are vital for effective collaboration and reproducibility in scien...

The widespread use of smartphones and tablets has made society heavily reliant on mobile applications (apps) for accessing various resources and services. These apps often handle sensitive personal, financial, and health data, making app security a critical concern for developers. While there is extensive research on software security topics like m...

The proliferation of mobile applications (apps) has made it crucial to ensure their accessibility for users with disabilities. However, there is a lack of research on the real-world challenges developers face in implementing mobile accessibility features. This study presents a large-scale empirical analysis of accessibility discussions on Stack Ove...

The rapid advancements in Generative AI (GenAI) tools, such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, are transforming software engineering by automating code generation tasks. While these tools improve developer productivity, they also present challenges for organizations and hiring professionals in evaluating software engineering candidates' true abilities...

Mobile applications (apps) have become an essential part of everyday life, offering convenient access to services such as banking, healthcare, and shopping. With these apps handling sensitive personal and financial data, ensuring their security is paramount. While previous research has explored mobile app developer practices, there is limited knowl...

Unit testing is an important practice that helps ensure the quality of a software system by validating its behavior through a series of test cases. Core to these test cases are assertion statements, which enable software practitioners to validate the correctness of the system's behavior. To aid with understanding and troubleshooting test case failu...

Software reuse is a crucial external quality attribute targeted by open-source and commercial projects. Despite that software reuse has experienced an increased adoption throughout the years, little is known about what aspects of code reuse developers discuss. In this paper, we present an empirical study of 1409 posts to better understand the chall...

Technical debt describes situations where developers write less-than-optimal code to meet project milestones. However, this debt accumulation often results in future developer effort to live with or fix these quality issues. To better manage this debt, developers may document their sub-optimal code as comments in the code (i.e., self-admitted techn...

Code comments are vital to source code as they help developers with program comprehension tasks. Written in natural language (usually English), code comments convey a variety of different information, which are grouped into specific categories. In this study, we construct 19 binary machine learning classifiers for code comment categories that belon...

Unit testing is a vital part of the software development process and involves developers writing code to verify or assert production code. Furthermore, to help comprehend the test case and troubleshoot issues, developers have the option to provide a message that explains the reason for the assertion failure. In this exploratory empirical study, we...

Identifier names play a significant role in program comprehension activities, with high-quality names improving developer productivity and system quality. To correct poor-quality names, developers rename identifiers to reflect their intended purpose better. However, renames do not always result in high-quality, long-lasting names; in many cases, de...

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit feature requests and other tasks such as bug fixing and code review. Although recent studies explored how to docu...

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit feature requests and other tasks such as bug fixing and code review. Although recent studies explored how to docu...

To meet project timelines or budget constraints, developers intentionally deviate from writing optimal code to feasible code in what is known as incurring Technical Debt (TD). Furthermore, as part of planning their correction, developers document these deficiencies as comments in the code (i.e., self-admitted technical debt or SATD). As a means of...

Before any software maintenance can occur, developers must read the identifier names found in the code to be maintained. Thus, high-quality identifier names are essential for productive program comprehension and maintenance activities. With developers free to construct identifier names to their liking, it can be difficult to automatically reason ab...

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the appropriate refactoring strategy is not always straightforward, resulting in developers seeking assistance. Although...

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the appropriate refactoring strategy is not always straightforward, resulting in developers seeking assistance. Although...

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that code refactoring activities are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the sy...

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that code refactoring activities are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the sy...

This paper presents an ensemble part-of-speech tagging approach for source code identifiers. Ensemble tagging is a technique that uses machine-learning and the output from multiple part-of-speech taggers to annotate natural language text at a higher quality than the part-of-speech taggers are able to obtain independently. Our ensemble uses three st...

Developers must comprehend the code they will maintain, meaning that the code must be legible and reasonably self-descriptive. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of research and tooling that supports developers in understanding their naming practices; whether the names they choose make sense, whether they are consistent, and whether they convey t...

Test smells are defined as sub-optimal design choices developers make when implementing test cases. Hence, similar to code smells, the research community has produced numerous test smell detection tools to investigate the impact of test smells on the quality and maintenance of test suites. However, little is known about the characteristics, type of...

Unknowingly, identifiers in the source code of a software system play a vital role in determining the quality of the system. Ambiguous and confusing identifier names lead developers to not only misunderstand the behavior of the code but also increases comprehension time and thereby causes a loss in productivity. Even though correcting poor names th...

It is good practice to name test methods such that they are comprehensible to developers; they must be written in such a way that their purpose and functionality are clear to those who will maintain them. Unfortunately, there is little automated support for writing or maintaining the names of test methods. This can lead to inconsistent and low-qual...

A key aspect of ensuring the quality of a software system is the practice of unit testing. Through unit tests, developers verify the correctness of production source code, thereby verifying the system's intended behavior under test. However, unit test code is subject to issues, ranging from bugs in the code to poor test case design (i.e., test smel...

Refactoring is the art of improving the structural design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Today, refactoring has become a well-established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research presuming that refactoring is primarily motivated by the need to improve system stru...

Refactoring is the art of improving the design of a system without altering its external behavior. Refactoring has become a well established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research presuming that refactoring is primarily motivated by the need to improve system structures. However, recent stu...

Identifiers make up a majority of the text in code. They are one of the most basic mediums through which developers describe the code they create and understand the code that others create. Therefore, understanding the patterns latent in identifier naming practices and how accurately we are able to automatically model these patterns is vital if res...

Identifiers make up a majority of the text in code. They are one of the most basic mediums through which developers describe the code they create and understand the code that others create. Therefore, understanding the patterns latent in identifier naming practices and how accurately we are able to automatically model these patterns is vital if res...

Identifier names are the atoms of program comprehension. Weak identifier names decrease developer productivity and degrade the performance of automated approaches that leverage identifier names in source code analysis; threatening many of the advantages which stand to be gained from advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Therefor...

We present a data set of abbreviations and expansions , derived from a set of five open source systems, for use by the research and development communities.

Permissions are one of the most fundamental components for protecting an Android user's privacy and security. Unfortunately, developers frequently misuse permissions by requiring too many or too few permissions, or by not adhering to permission best practices. These permission-related issues can negatively impact users in a variety of ways, ranging...

Expanding abbreviations is an important text normalization technique used for the purpose of either increasing developer comprehension or supporting the application of natural-language-based tools for source code identifiers. This paper closely studies abbreviations and where their expansions occur in different software artifacts. Without abbreviat...

This paper presents the features of a model that relates the natural language found in identifiers with program semantics. The model takes advantage of part of speech information and static-analysis-based program models to understand how different types of statically-derived semantics correlates with the natural language meaning of identifiers.

Identifier names are the atoms of comprehension; weak identifier names decrease productivity by increasing the chance that developers make mistakes and increasing the time taken to understand chunks of code. Therefore, it is vital to support developers in naming, and renaming, identifiers. In this paper, we study how terms in an identifier change d...

Throughout the lifetime of a software system, developers continuously refactor the source code as a means of improving the quality of the code. Android apps, like traditional software systems, are not exempt from such refactoring activities. We conducted an empirical study to show the common refactor-ing operations in Android apps and discussed how...

Renaming is vital to software maintenance and evolution. Developers rename entities when their original names no longer fit their behavioral role within the program. This may happen if the entity's original name was of poor quality or if the system has evolved such that the original name needs to be updated to reflect some of this evolution. In the...

Self-Adaptive Systems (SAS) are revolutionizing many aspects of our society. From server clusters to autonomous vehicles, SAS are becoming more ubiquitous and essential to our world. Security is frequently a priority for these systems as many SAS conduct mission-critical operations, or work with sensitive information. Fortunately, security is being...

Do you know the permissions your favorite apps use? You probably don't, and you aren't alone. Everyone seemingly talks about how important app security and privacy is to them, but research has shown that users are generally not well informed about the permissions their apps use. This leads to serious ramifications for security, privacy and user per...

Android applications (apps) are not immune to the problems which also plague conventional software including security vulnerabilities, quality defects, permission misuse, and numerous other issues. Many developers even intentionally create vulnerable or malicious apps (malware) for often highly lucrative purposes. We need to better understand curre...

The reality of today's computing landscape already suffers from a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, and this gap only expected to grow. We need to generate interest in this STEM topic early in our student's careers and provide teachers the resources they need to succeed in addressing this gap. To address this shortfall we present Practical L...

Mobile applications (apps) should be accessible to everyone, yet many of even the most popular are not. To address the lack of accessibility problem, we created a set of educational modules. These modules may be used to teach students and developers about proper methods of creating accessible apps, and on the importance of accessibility guidelines....

Even with advances in technology, group meetings between hearing and deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) students can be challenging for all participants. This paper introduces CollabAll, a system that aims to better facilitate productive meetings between D/HH and hearing students. CollabAll provides D/HH individuals with a mechanism to actively partic...