Context: The automated identification of code fragments characterized by common design flaws (or ‘‘code smells’’) that can be handled through refactoring, fosters refactoring activities, especially in large code bases where multiple developers are engaged without a detailed view on the whole system. Automated refactoring to design patterns enables significant contributions to design quality eve...

The quality of requirements artifacts, such as software requirements specifications, is crucial for the success of a software development project, because the later a defect is found the more expensive it is to fix. However, as virtually all requirements are still written in natural language, and requirements artifacts grow often large, they are very hard to review for quality due to the imprec...

Purpose: Code smells are residuals of technical debt induced by the developers. They hinder evolution, adaptability and maintenance software. Meanwhile, they very beneficial in indicating loopholes problems bugs Machine learning has been extensively used to predict Smells research. The current study aims optimise prediction using Ensemble Learning Feature Selection techniques on three open-sour...

Refactoring is the art of improving design a system without altering its external behavior. has become well established and disciplined software engineering practice that attracted significant amount research presuming refactoring primarily motivated by need to improve structures. However, recent studies have shown developers may incorporate refactorings in other development activities go beyon...

People in Western cultures are poor at naming smells and flavors. However, for wine and coffee experts, describing smells and flavors is part of their daily routine. So are experts better than lay people at conveying smells and flavors in language? If smells and flavors are more easily linguistically expressed by experts, or more "codable", then experts should be better than novices at describi...

Refactoring is not only useful for source code of implementations, but as well for test specifications. The open source TRex tool automates the application of refactorings and the detection of refactoring opportunities for test suites that are specified using the standardised Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3). Depending on the refactoring, the behaviour preserving transformations may i...

An architectural bad smell is a commonly (although not always intentionally) used set of architectural design decisions that negatively impacts system lifecycle properties, such as understandability, testability, extensibility, and reusability. In our previous short paper, we introduced the notion of architectural bad smells and outlined a few common smells. In this paper, we significantly expa...

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been applied in many fields and especially to complex engineering problems and applications. The AHP is capable of structuring decision problems and finding mathematically determined judgments built on knowledge and experience. This suggests that AHP should prove useful in agile software development where complex decisions occur routinely. In this paper,...

Most graphical user interface (GUI) libraries forbid accessing UI elements from threads other than the UI event loop thread. Violating this requirement leads to a program crash or an inconsistent UI. Unfortunately, such errors are all too common in GUI programs. We present a polymorphic type and effect system that prevents non-UI threads from accessing UI objects or invoking UI-thread-only meth...