Asif Imran

Asif Imran, Tevfik Kosar, Jaroslaw Zola et al.

Automated batch refactoring has become a de-facto mechanism to restructure software that may have significant design flaws negatively impacting the code quality and maintainability. Although automated batch refactoring techniques are known to significantly improve overall software quality and maintainability, their impact on resource utilization is not well studied. This paper aims to bridge the gap between batch refactoring code smells and consumption of resources. It determines the relationship between software code smell batch refactoring, and resource consumption. Next, it aims to design algorithms to predict the impact of code smell refactoring on resource consumption. This paper investigates 16 code smell types and their joint effect on resource utilization for 31 open source applications. It provides a detailed empirical analysis of the change in application CPU and memory utilization after refactoring specific code smells in isolation and in batches. This analysis is then used to train regression algorithms to predict the impact of batch refactoring on CPU and memory utilization before making any refactoring decisions. Experimental results also show that our ANN-based regression model provides highly accurate predictions for the impact of batch refactoring on resource consumption. It allows the software developers to intelligently decide which code smells they should refactor jointly to achieve high code quality and maintainability without increasing the application resource utilization. This paper responds to the important and urgent need of software engineers across a broad range of software applications, who are looking to refactor code smells and at the same time improve resource consumption. Finally, it brings forward the concept of resource aware code smell refactoring to the most crucial software applications.

Asif Imran, Tevfik Kosar

The low cost and rapid provisioning capabilities have made the cloud a desirable platform to launch complex scientific applications. However, resource utilization optimization is a significant challenge for cloud service providers, since the earlier focus is provided on optimizing resources for the applications that run on the cloud, with a low emphasis being provided on optimizing resource utilization of the cloud computing internal processes. Code refactoring has been associated with improving the maintenance and understanding of software code. However, analyzing the impact of the refactoring source code of the cloud and studying its impact on cloud resource usage require further analysis. In this paper, we propose a framework called Unified Regression Modelling (URegM) which predicts the impact of code smell refactoring on cloud resource usage. We test our experiments in a real-life cloud environment using a complex scientific application as a workload. Results show that URegM is capable of accurately predicting resource consumption due to code smell refactoring. This will permit cloud service providers with advanced knowledge about the impact of refactoring code smells on resource consumption, thus allowing them to plan their resource provisioning and code refactoring more effectively.

Punit Kumar, Asif Imran, Tevfik Kosar

This paper presents a detailed comparative analysis of the performance of three major Python data manipulation libraries - Pandas, Polars, and Dask - specifically when embedded within complete deep learning (DL) training and inference pipelines. The research bridges a gap in existing literature by studying how these libraries interact with substantial GPU workloads during critical phases like data loading, preprocessing, and batch feeding. The authors measured key performance indicators including runtime, memory usage, disk usage, and energy consumption (both CPU and GPU) across various machine learning models and datasets.

Asif Imran, Tevfik Kosar

Software design smells are design attributes which violate the fundamental design principles. Design smells are a key cause of design debt. Although the activities of design smell identification and measurement are predominantly considered in current literature, those which identify and communicate which design smells occur more frequently in newly developing software and which ones are more dominant in established software have been studied to a limited extent. This research describes a mechanism for identifying the design smells that are more prevalent in developing and established software respectively. A tool is provided which is used for design smell detection by analyzing large volumes of source code. More specifically, 164,609 Lines of Code (LoC) and 5,712 class files of six developing and 244,930 LoC and 12,048 class files of five established open-source Java software are analyzed. Obtained results show that out of the 4,020 occurrences of smells that were made for nine preselected types of design smells, 1,643 design smells were detected for developing software, which mainly consisted of four specific types of smells. For established software, 2,397 design smells were observed which predominantly consisted of four other types of smells. The remaining design smell was equally prevalent in both developing and established software. Desirable precision values ranging from 72.9% to 84.1% were obtained for the tool.

Md Arman Islam, Devi Varaprasad Jonnala, Ritika Rekhi et al.

As the quality of code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) improves, their adoption in the software industry for automated code generation continues to grow. Researchers primarily focus on enhancing the functional correctness of the generated code while commonly overlooking its energy efficiency and environmental impact. This paper investigates the energy efficiency of the code generated by 20 popular LLMs for 878 programming problems of varying difficulty levels and diverse algorithmic categories selected from the LeetCode platform by comparing them against canonical human-written solutions. Although LLMs can produce functionally correct results in most cases, our findings show that the performance and energy efficiency of LLM-produced solutions are often far below those of human-written solutions. Among the studied LLMs, DeepSeek-v3 and GPT-4o generate the most energy-efficient code, whereas Grok-2 and Gemini-1.5-Pro are among the least energy-efficient models. On average, human-generated canonical solutions are approximately 1.17 times more energy efficient than DeepSeek-v3, 1.21 times more energy efficient than GPT-4o, and over 2 times more energy efficient than Grok-2 and Gemini-1.5-Pro. For specific algorithmic groups such as dynamic programming, backtracking, and bit manipulation, LLM-generated code can consume up to 450 times more energy than human-generated canonical solutions.

Asif Imran, Tevfik Kosar

Cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) have gained popularity due to their low cost and elasticity. However, like other software, SaaS applications suffer from code smells, which can drastically affect functionality and resource usage. Code smell is any design in the source code that indicates a deeper problem. The software community deploys automated refactoring to eliminate smells which can improve performance and also decrease the usage of critical resources. However, studies that analyze the impact of automatic refactoring smells in SaaS on resources such as CPU and memory have been conducted to a limited extent. Here, we aim to fill that gap and study the impact on resource usage of SaaS applications due to automatic refactoring of seven classic code smells: god class, feature envy, type checking, cyclic dependency, shotgun surgery, god method, and spaghetti code. We specified six real-life SaaS applications from Github called Zimbra, OneDataShare, GraphHopper, Hadoop, JENA, and JAMES which ran on Openstack cloud. Results show that refactoring smells by tools like JDeodrant and JSparrow have widely varying impacts on the CPU and memory consumption of the tested applications based on the type of smell refactored. We present the resource utilization impact of each smell and also discuss the potential reasons leading to that effect.

Amit Seal Ami, Asif Imran, Alim Ul Gias et al.

The aim of any curriculum is to produce industry ready students. The effectiveness of curricular activities, thus, can be measured by the performances of fresh graduates at their job sectors. To evaluate the Software Engineering (SE) syllabus, Institute of Information Technology (IIT), University of Dhaka, has taken an initiative, under the project IQAC, HEQEP, where a survey based study has been performed. The uniqueness of this SE syllabus is having a six month long internship semester inside the curriculum. Considering all the other courses and activities as traditional, the outcome of the study can fairly be considered as the effect of the Internship program. The result shows that the students having internship experiences, performed above the level of expectation from the industries.

Asif Imran, Tevfik Kosar

Software Engineering is a constantly evolving subject area that faces new challenges every day as it tries to automate newer business processes. One of the key challenges to the success of a software solution is attaining sustainability. The inability of numerous software to sustain for the desired time-length is caused by limited consideration given towards sustainability during the stages of software development. This review aims to present a detailed and inclusive study covering both the technical and non-technical challenges and approaches of software sustainability. A systematic and comprehensive literature review was conducted based on 107 relevant studies that were selected using the Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) technique. The study showed that sustainability can be achieved by conducting specific activities at the technical and non-technical levels. The technical level consists of software design, coding, and user experience attributes. The non-technical level consists of documentation, sustainability manifestos, training of software engineers, funding software projects, and leadership skills of project managers to achieve sustainability. This paper groups the existing research efforts based on the above aspects. Next, how those aspects affect open and closed source software is tabulated. Based on the findings of this review, it is seen that both technical and non-technical sustainability aspects are equally important, taking one into contention and ignoring the other will threaten the sustenance of software products.

Alim Ul Gias, Rayhanur Rahman, Asif Imran et al.

Performance Testing is critical for applications like web services and e-commerce platforms to ensure enhanced end user experience. In such cases, starting to test the system's performance early should significantly reduce the overall development cost. Test-first Performance (TFP) is one such paradigm that allows performance testing right from the early stage of development. Given such potential benefit, this paper proposes the design of a testing framework IVRIDIO which introduces TFP as a Service (TFPaaS). IVRIDIO incorporates the Plugin for TFP in the Cloud (PTFPC) aiming to provide instant feedbacks - a prime requirement of TFP to immediately fix critical performance issues. Furthermore, the Convention over Configuration (CoC) design paradigm has been applied by introducing a configurable project template to maintain TFP test cases. The prototyping details of the framework are given and the variation of response time to the inclusion of PTFPC has also been discussed. The Summated Usability Metric (SUM) score has been provided so that it can later be used for comparing the PTFPC plugin's usability.