Zadia Codabux

Context: Technical Debt needs to be managed to avoid disastrous consequences, and investigating developers' habits concerning technical debt management is invaluable information in software development. Objective: This study aims to characterize how developers manage technical debt based on the code smells they induce and the refactorings they appl...

Technical debt is the consequence of trade-offs made during software development to ensure speedy releases. The research community lacks rigorously evaluated guidelines to help practitioners characterize, manage and prioritize debt. This paper describes a study conducted with an industrial partner during their implementation of Agile development pr...

Context Technical debt refers to the consequences of taking shortcuts when developing software. These consequences can impede the software growth and have financial implications. The software engineering research community needs to explore technical debt further from a practitioner standpoint. Objective This study gathers insights from practitione...

It is important to maintain software quality as a software system evolves. Managing code smells in source code contributes towards quality software. While metrics have been used to pinpoint code smells in source code, we present an empirical study on the correlation of code smells with class-level (micro pattern) and method-level (nano-pattern) tra...

Recently, Technical Debt (TD) has gained popularity in the Software Engineering community to describe design decisions that allow software development teams to achieve short term benefits such as expedited release of code. Technical debt accrued should be managed to avoid the disastrous consequences of these temporary workarounds. Management of tec...

Code review is a widely adopted quality assurance practice in software engineering, where expert reviewers assess developers' code changes before merging. While prior studies have explored review comment quality and usefulness, they often overlook the clarity and understandability of Code Change Request (CCR) comments. Unclear CCR comments can pose...

Mining Software Repositories (MSR) has become a popular research area recently. MSR analyzes different sources of data, such as version control systems, code repositories, defect tracking systems, archived communication, deployment logs, and so on, to uncover interesting and actionable insights from the data for improved software development, maint...

Mining software repositories (MSR) has become a popular research area recently. MSR analyzes different sources of data, such as version control systems, code repositories, defect tracking systems, archived communication, deployment logs, and so on, to uncover interesting and actionable insights from the data for improved software development, maint...

Competitive programming platforms like LeetCode, Codeforces, and HackerRank evaluate programming skills, often used by recruiters for screening. With the rise of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta AI, their problem-solving ability on these platforms needs assessment. This study explores LLMs' ability to tackle d...

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an integral part of the software development process where developers improve product quality through collaborative discussions. Unfortunately, these discussions can sometimes become heated by the presence of inappropriate behaviors such as personal attacks, insults, disrespectful comments, and derogatory conduct, often...

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an integral part of the software development process where developers improve product quality through collaborative discussions. Unfortunately, these discussions can sometimes become heated by the presence of inappropriate behaviors such as personal attacks, insults, disrespectful comments, and derogatory conduct, often...

The importance of Industry-Academia Collaboration (IAC) and ways to improve IAC have been extensively discussed in the literature. The impact of IAC on Software Engineering (SE) research is particularly appealing as SE research aims to provide translatable outcomes to the software industry. In this position paper, we derive from our combined 15+ ye...

Industry practitioners assess software from a security perspective to reduce the risks of deploying vulnerable software. Besides following security best practice guidelines during the software development life cycle, predicting vulnerability before roll‐out is crucial. Software metrics are popular inputs for vulnerability prediction models. The obj...

Background: Software security is crucial to ensure that the users are protected from undesirable consequences such as malware attacks which can result in loss of data and, subsequently, financial loss. Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor incurred by suboptimal decisions resulting in long-term consequences such as increased defects and vulnerabilities...

Background: Software security is crucial to ensure that the users are protected from undesirable consequences such as malware attacks which can result in loss of data and, subsequently, financial loss. Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor incurred by suboptimal decisions resulting in long-term consequences such as increased defects and vulnerabilities...

Software documentation is often neglected, impacting maintenance and reuse and leading to technical issues. In particular, when working with scientific software, such issues in the documentation pose a risk to producing reliable scientific results as they may cause improper or incorrect use of the software. R is a popular programming language for s...

Software refactoring is a behavior-preserving activity to improve the source code quality without changing its external behavior. Unfortunately, it is often a manual and error-prone task that may induce regressions in the source code. Researchers have provided initial compelling evidence of the relation between refactoring and defects, yet little i...

The 1st edition of the workshop on Mining Software Repositories for Privacy and Security (MSR4P&S 2022) was held virtually on November 18th, 2022, co-located with the 30th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2022), which took place in Singapore. MSR4P&S rec...

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is primarily studied in Object-Oriented (OO) languages and traditionally commercial software. However, scientific software coded in dynamically-typed languages such as R differs in paradigm, and the source code comments’ semantics are different (i.e., more aligned with algorithms and statistics when compared to t...

Automated Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) analyze source-code to capture defects and ensure higher quality. SonarQube is a renown ASAT that supports mainstream programming languages. However, R programming is not included. R is an increasingly popular multi-paradigm and package-based programming environment for scientific programming. Nevertheless, R...

Code ridden with Technical Debt (TD) has motivated software engineers to keep the quality of systems under control to ease future maintenance tasks. In the last decade, there have been significant advances regarding TD management (TDM). However, research about incorporating TDM into the software development lifecycle remains scarce, and existing ap...

Software refactoring is the activity associated with developers changing the internal structure of source code without modifying its external behavior. The literature argues that refactoring might have beneficial and harmful implications for software maintainability, primarily when performed without the support of automated tools. This paper contin...

Context: Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor used to describe code that is "not quite right." Although TD studies have gained momentum, TD has yet to be studied as thoroughly in non-Object-Oriented (OO) or scientific software such as R. R is a multi-paradigm programming language, whose popularity in data science and statistical applications has ampli...

Context: Technical Debt is a metaphor used to describe code that is "not quite right." Although TD studies have gained momentum, TD has yet to be studied as thoroughly in non-Object-Oriented (OO) or scientific software such as R. R is a multi-paradigm programming language, whose popularity in data science and statistical applications has amplified...

Context: Security is vital to software developed for commercial or personal use. Although more organizations are realizing the importance of applying secure coding practices, in many of them, security concerns are not known or addressed until a security failure occurs. The root cause of security failures is vulnerable code. While metrics have been...

The 12th Doctoral Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (IDOESE), was organized as a full day event prior to the ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) program. Seven PhD candidates came from different research institutes across the globe to present their research proposals at the symposium...

Technical debt has recently become a major concern in the software industry. While it has been shown that technical debt has an adverse effect on the quality of a software system, there has been little work to explore this relationship. Further, with the growing number of approaches to estimate the technical debt principal of a software system, the...

Nowadays, the increased use of battery-powered mobile appliances and the urge to access time-sensitive data anytime anywhere has fuelled a high demand for wireless networks. However, wireless networks are susceptible to intrusion and security problems. There is an inherent need to secure the wireless data communication to ensure the confidentiality...

Nowadays, the increased use of battery-powered mobile appliances and the urge to access sensitive data anywhere has fuelled the demand for wireless networks. However, wireless network is susceptible to intrusion and security problems. There is an inherent need to secure the wireless data communication to ensure the confidentiality, authenticity, in...