Rubbing salt in the wound? A large-scale investigation into the effects of refactoring on security.

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 is known about how much it may impact software security.

On the adequacy of static analysis warnings with respect to code smell prediction.

Code smells are poor implementation choices that developers apply while evolving source code and that affect program maintainability. Multiple automated code smell detectors have been proposed: while most of them relied on heuristics applied over software metrics, a recent trend concerns the definition of machine learning techniques. However, machine learning-based code smell detectors still suffer from low accuracy: one of the causes is the lack of adequate features to feed machine learners.