Venera Arnaoudova

Washington State University | WSU · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Developers often use Static Code Analysis Tools (SCAT) to automatically detect different kinds of quality flaws in their source code. Since many warnings raised by SCATs may be irrelevant for a project/organization, it can be possible to leverage information from the project development history, to automatically configure which warnings a SCAT shou...

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...

Eye tracking tools are used in software engineering research to study various software development activities. However, a major limitation of these tools is their inability to track gaze data for activities that involve source code editing. We present a novel solution to support eye tracking experiments for tasks involving source code edits as an e...

A large portion of the cost of any software lies in the time spent by developers in understanding a program’s source code before any changes can be undertaken. Measuring program comprehension is not a trivial task. In fact, different studies use self-reported and various psycho-physiological measures as proxies. In this research, we propose a metho...

It has been well documented that a large portion of the cost of any software lies in the time spent by developers in understanding a program’s source code before any changes can be undertaken. One of the main contributors to software comprehension, by subsequent developers or by the authors themselves, has to do with the quality of the lexicon, (i....

With the increasing popularity of open-source software development, there is a tremendous growth of software artifacts that provide insight into how people build software. Researchers are always looking for large-scale and representative software artifacts to produce systematic and unbiased validation of novel and existing techniques. For example,...

Deep neural networks is a popular technique that has been applied successfully to domains such as image processing , sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and computational linguistic. Deep neural networks are machine learning algorithms that, in general, require a labeled set of positive and negative examples that are used to tune hyper-paramete...

The fragile base-class problem (FBCP) has been described in the literature as a consequence of “misusing” inheritance and composition in object-oriented programming when (re)using frameworks. Many research works have focused on preventing the FBCP by proposing alternative mechanisms for reuse, but, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous...

Past and recent studies have shown that design smells which are poor solutions to recurrent design problems make object-oriented systems difficult to maintain, and that they negatively impact the class change- and fault-proneness. More recently, lexical smells have been introduced to capture recurring poor practices in the naming, documentation, an...

This technical briefing presents the state of the art Text Retrieval and Natural Language Processing techniques used in Software Engineering and discusses their applications in the field.

Energy consumption is a major concern when developing and evolving mobile applications. The user wishes to access fast and powerful mobile applications, which is usually in contrast to optimized battery life and heat generation. The software engineering community have acknowledged the relevance of the problem and researchers are investigating ways...

Energy consumption is a major concern when developing and evolving mobile applications. The user wishes to access fast and powerful mobile applications, which is usually in contrast to optimized battery life and heat generation. The software engineering community have acknowledged the relevance of the problem and researchers are investigating ways...

Energy consumption is a major concern when developing and evolving mobile applications and researchers are investigating ways to reduce energy consumption. We conjecture that these studies are at the border between hardware and software and we must be careful on how the energy consumption is measured. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work...

Code reviews have been conducted since decades in software projects, with the aim of improving code quality from many different points of view. During code reviews, developers are supported by checklists, coding standards and, possibly, by various kinds of static analysis tools. This paper investigates whether warnings highlighted by static analysi...

Antipatterns are known as poor solutions to recurring problems. For example, Brown et al. and Fowler define practices concerning poor design or implementation solutions. However, we know that the source code lexicon is part of the factors that affect the psychological complexity of a program, i.e., factors that make a program difficult to understan...

Source code lexicon plays a paramount role in software quality: poor lexicon can lead to poor comprehensibility and even increase software fault-proneness. For this reason, renaming a program entity, i.e., altering the entity identifier, is an important activity during software evolution. Developers rename when they feel that the name of an entity...

On the 5th of March, 2013, the first workshop on Patterns Promotion and Anti-patterns Prevention (PPAP 2013) took place in Genova, Italy. PPAP 2013 was co-located with the 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR'2013), the premier European conference on the theory and practice of maintenance, reengineering and evolu...

Recent and past studies have shown that poor source code lexicon negatively affects software understandabil- ity, maintainability, and, overall, quality. Besides a poor usage of lexicon and documentation, sometimes a software artifact description is misleading with respect to its implementation. Consequently, developers will spend more time and eff...

In software development, early identification of fault-prone classes can save a considerable amount of resources. In the literature, source code structural metrics have been widely investigated as one of the factors that can be used to identify faulty classes. Structural metrics measure code complexity, one aspect of the source code quality. Comple...

Identifiers play an important role in source code understandability, maintainability, and fault-proneness. This paper reports a study of identifier renamings in software systems, studying how terms (identifier atomic components) change in source code identifiers. Specifically, the paper (i) proposes a term renaming taxonomy, (ii) presents an approx...

Previous studies showed that linguistic information contained in source code is a valuable source of information and can help to improve program comprehension. The proposed research focuses on improving the quality of source code by studying common negative practices with respect to linguistic information. The definition of the so called linguistic...

Poorly-chosen identifiers have been reported in the literature as misleading and increasing the program comprehension effort. Identifiers are composed of terms, which can be dictionary words, acronyms, contractions, or simple strings. We conjecture that the use of identical terms in different contexts may increase the risk of faults. We investigate...

Graphical representation has long been used in the domain of software engineering to provide comprehension aids. Generic and query-based code browsers have contributed towards program comprehension through the provision of high-level customized structural views of the source code. Some research has already focused on combining the advantages of the...

In object-oriented programming, the adoption of modules as mixins provides a second axis of modularity. Furthermore, support for aspect-oriented programming introduces a third such axis. In this paper we define criteria under which a feature should be placed in a given unit of modularity and investigate the degree to which the presence of multiple...

It has now been over a decade since the introduction of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). As the AspectJ programming language (being one of the notable technologies of AOP) gains acceptance in industry and academia, its comprehensibility property is an important factor in determining an eventual wide acceptance by practitioners in development and...

In this paper we discuss an approach to support declarative reasoning over aspect-oriented (AO) programs, adopting AspectJ as a representative technology. The approach is based on the transformation of source code into a set of facts and rules, stored into a Prolog database. Declarative analysis allows us to extract complex information through its...