Ivan Machado

Joselito Júnior, Gláucya Boechat, Ivan Machado

In a wave of growth, open-source projects need to modernize and change how they deal with processes, methods, and communication with their contributors. We could observe that open-source projects are constantly evolving to improve their management of the entire community. Starting with community communication, software development, managing open-source projects faces crucial challenges. One of the enabling environments that open-source communities found to achieve community communications objectives was code repositories with integration with issue trackers. Using issue trackers in their projects should encompass an infrastructure capable of hosting the project source code and community participation. Some issue trackers use a structure in which the issue's title and description are the key information. However, we have observed a slight change in this strategy over the years, as more and more data are fundamental to solving the issue. For example, labeling the issues could enable users to provide the issue with more contextual information. By understanding how modern issue trackers handle issue labeling, this study analyzes the impact, engagement, and influence that labels have on the Github repositories, based on a database of 10,673,459 issues mined from 13,280 repositories in 180 Github featured topics. We found that 78.75\% of the repositories label their issues, with more adherence from those repositories that contain big numbers of issues. The labeling practice is essential and prioritized as a first step in the issue resolution process in 65.91\% of the first events. Issues with labels draw more attention and impact by collecting more subscribers, assigns, and comments, helping to engage contributors to the resolution.

Denivan Campos, Larissa Rocha, Ivan Machado

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance, unit tests are subject to bad design or implementation decisions, the so-called test smells. These might decrease software systems quality from various aspects, making it harder to understand, more complex to maintain, and more prone to errors and bugs. Many studies discuss the likely effects of test smells on test code. However, there is a lack of studies that capture developers perceptions of such issues. This study empirically analyzes how developers perceive the severity of test smells in the test code they develop. Severity refers to the degree to how a test smell may negatively impact the test code. We selected six open-source software projects from GitHub and interviewed their developers to understand whether and how the test smells affected the test code. Although most of the interviewed developers considered the test smells as having a low severity to their code, they indicated that test smells might negatively impact the project, particularly in test code maintainability and evolution. Also, detecting and removing test smells from the test code may be positive for the project.

Maykon Nunes, Emanuel Coutinho, Carla Bezerra et al.

Angular is one of the most widely adopted frameworks for developing large-scale, dynamic web applications. As projects increase in scope and complexity, developers face growing challenges in managing architecture and maintaining clean, modular code. These challenges often lead to design flaws, commonly referred to as code smells. While React-specific smells have been cataloged in prior studies, limited knowledge exists regarding Angular-specific smells and how they manifest. This study investigates Angular code smells through a grey literature review, consolidating community knowledge and technical discussions. From the collected sources, 11 distinct Angular code smells were identified, 6 of which also occur in React-based systems, suggesting that some issues are cross-framework. Each smell was analyzed, exemplified, and grouped according to its technical characteristics. Based on the resulting catalog, we implemented an automated static analysis tool to detect Angular code smells. The tool was empirically evaluated using a manually validated dataset, and its effectiveness was assessed through standard information retrieval metrics. The evaluation results indicate high detection performance across all smells, achieving accuracy values above 0.88 and F1-scores ranging from 0.89 to 1.00. The findings reveal recurring issues such as component overloading, duplicated logic, and inefficient template bindings, reinforcing the relevance of systematic detection support. This study presents the first catalog of Angular-specific code smells derived from grey literature and demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of automated detection, providing a solid foundation for future empirical studies and tool development aimed at improving front-end code quality.

Israely Lima, Lucas Moura Lourenço, Márcio Ribeiro et al.

Software development is a sociotechnical and human-centered endeavor in which human factors directly influence quality, productivity, and innovation capacity. In this context, career development in computing goes beyond technical mastery, requiring competencies that enable professionals to deal with continuous change and collaborative demands. Among these, non-technical skills (soft skills) stand out, encompassing social, emotional, and communicational dimensions essential to team effectiveness and the success of software projects. Despite their recognized importance, there is still a need for a systematic mapping of the most relevant soft skills over the past 25 years, a period marked by the adoption of agile approaches in industry. This gap limits the integration of human and technical aspects in software development. This study presents a systematic mapping of the literature, analyzing 97 studies published between January 2000 and May 2025 across major scientific databases. The results identify recurring competencies such as communication, adaptability, teamwork, and leadership, as well as their association with different roles in agile contexts. The main agile approaches adopted, particularly Scrum, are also identified, along with key gaps in the literature, such as the lack of studies on role specific soft skills. The findings can support researchers, educators, and practitioners in designing curricula, training strategies, and organizational practices aligned with human factors, reinforcing the importance of integrating social and technical dimensions in the development of collaborative and innovative professionals.

Renata Souza, Orges Cico, Ivan Machado

Today's significant technological advancement allows early-stage software startups to build and launch innovative products quickly on the market. However, many of them die in the early years of their path due to market conditions, ignorance of customer needs, lack of resources, or focus, such as the misuse of well-established practices. The study's motivation is to analyze software engineering practices in startups from a practitioner's perspective. Our objective was to identify practices and tools the startups employ in their daily routines. We carried out an expert survey study with 140 software developers involved in software startups from different domains. The results show that startups in the initial and validation phases select practices and tools on an ad-hoc basis and based on the development team's prior knowledge. When they move into the growth phase, they recognize that they could have adopted better practices beforehand to support product scaling with a more mature team. The results also indicated that support tools are selected based on their integration with other tools and their ability to automate operational activities.

Luana Martins, Vinicius Brito, Daniela Feitosa et al.

The teaching-learning process may require specific pedagogical approaches to establish a relationship with industry practices. Recently, some studies investigated the educators' perspectives and the undergraduate courses curriculum to identify potential weaknesses and solutions for the software testing teaching process. However, it is still unclear how the practitioners evaluate the acquisition of knowledge about software testing in undergraduate courses. This study carried out an expert survey with 68 newly graduated practitioners to determine what the industry expects from them and what they learned in academia. The yielded results indicated that those practitioners learned at a similar rate as others with a long industry experience. Also, they studied less than half of the 35 software testing topics collected in the survey and took industry-backed extracurricular courses to complement their learning. Additionally, our findings point out a set of implications for future research, as the respondents' learning difficulties (e.g., lack of learning sources) and the gap between academic education and industry expectations (e.g., certifications).

Nildo Silva Junior, Larissa Rocha, Luana Almeida Martins et al.

Developing test code may be a time-consuming task that usually requires much effort and cost, especially when it is done manually. Besides, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead to the introduction of the so-called test smells in test code. Test smells are bad solutions to either implement or design test code. As the test code with test smells increases in size, these tests might become more complex, and as a consequence, much harder to understand and evolve correctly. Therefore, test smells may have a negative impact on the quality and maintenance of test code and may also harm the whole software testing activities. In this context, this study aims to understand whether test professionals non-intentionally insert test smells. We carried out an expert survey to analyze the usage frequency of a set of test smells. Sixty professionals from different companies participated in the survey. We selected 14 widely studied smells from the literature, which are also implemented in existing test smell detection tools. The yielded results indicate that experienced professionals introduce test smells during their daily programming tasks, even when they are using standardized practices from their companies, and not only for their personal assumptions. Another relevant evidence was that developers' professional experience can not be considered as a root-cause for the insertion of test smells in test code.