Publications

To meet project timelines or budget constraints, developers intentionally deviate from writing optimal code to feasible code in what is …

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are …

Before any software maintenance can occur, developers must read the identifier names found in the code to be maintained. Thus, …

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project …

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to …

Developers must comprehend the code they will maintain, meaning that the code must be legible and reasonably self-descriptive. …

This paper presents an ensemble part-of-speech tagging approach for source code identifiers. Ensemble tagging is a technique that uses …

Test smells are defined as sub-optimal design choices developers make when implementing test cases. Hence, similar to code smells, the …

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 …

A key aspect of ensuring the quality of a software system is the practice of unit testing. Through unit tests, developers verify the …

The test code, just like production source code, is subject to bad design and programming practices, also known as smells. The presence …

Refactoring is the art of improving the structural design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Today, …

Identifiers make up a majority of the text in code. They are one of the most basic mediums through which developers describe the code …

Refactoring is one of the means of managing technical debt and maintaining a healthy software structure through enforcing best design …

An essential activity of software maintenance is the refactoring of source code. Refactoring operations enable developers to take …

Identifier names are the atoms of program comprehension. Weak identifier names decrease developer productivity and degrade the …

The impact of bad programming practices, such as code smells, in production code has been the focus of numerous studies in software …

Unknowingly, identifiers in the source code of a software system play a vital role in determining the quality of the system. Ambiguous …

Permissions are one of the most fundamental components for protecting an Android user’s privacy and security. Unfortunately, …

This paper presents the features of a model that relates the natural language found in identifiers with program semantics. The model …

Identifier names are the atoms of comprehension; weak identifier names decrease productivity by increasing the chance that developers …

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

Expanding abbreviations is an important text normalization technique used for the purpose of either increasing developer comprehension …

Android applications (apps) rely upon proper permission usage to ensure that the user’s privacy and security are adequately …

Throughout the lifetime of a software system, developers continuously refactor the source code as a means of improving the quality of …

Renaming is vital to software maintenance and evolution. Developers rename entities when their original names no longer fit their …

The widespread adoption of mobile devices, coupled with the ease of developing mobile-based applications (apps) has created a lucrative …

Android applications (apps) are not immune to the problems which also plague conventional software including security vulnerabilities, …

Self-Adaptive Systems (SAS) are revolutionizing many aspects of our society. From server clusters to autonomous vehicles, SAS are …

The reality of today’s computing landscape already suffers from a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, and this gap only …

Do you know the permissions your favorite apps use? You probably don’t, and you aren’t alone. Everyone seemingly talks …

Mobile applications (apps) should be accessible to everyone, yet many of even the most popular are not. To address the lack of …

Even with advances in technology, group meetings between hearing and deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) students can be challenging for …

Android applications rely on a permission-based model to carry out core functionality. Appropriate permission usage is imperative for …

To satisfy security requirements, software architects often adopt security tactics. These architectural tactics provide mechanisms for …