ESEIW 2025
Mon 29 September - Fri 3 October 2025

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Fri 3 Oct 2025 09:40 - 10:00 at Kaiulani I - Technical Debt, Smells and Refactoring

Architectural smells, design flaws such as God Class, Cyclic Dependency, and Hub-like Dependency, erode maintainability and often impair runtime behaviour. While existing detectors flag these issues, they rarely suggest how to remove them. We developed ROSE, a recommender system that turns smell reports into concrete refactoring advice by leveraging pre-trained code transformers. We frame remediation as a three-way classification task (Extract Method, Move Class, Pull Up Method) and fine-tune CodeBERT and CodeT5 on 2.1 million refactoring instances mined with RefactoringMiner from 11,149 open-source Java projects. Running with ten-fold cross-validation, CodeT5 gets 96.9% accuracy and a macro-F1 of 0.95, outperforming CodeBERT by 10 percentage points and all classical baselines reported in the original dataset study. Confusion-matrix analysis shows that both models separate Pull Up Method well, whereas Extract Method remains challenging because of overlap with structurally similar changes. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that transformers can close the gap between architectural-smell detection and actionable repair. The study illustrates the promise, and current limits, of data-driven, architecture-level refactoring, laying the groundwork for richer recommender systems that cover a wider range of smells and languages. We release code, trained checkpoints, and the balanced dataset under an open licence to encourage replication.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Fri 3 Oct

Displayed time zone: Hawaii change

09:40 - 11:00
09:40
20m
Talk
ROSE: Transformer-Based Refactoring Recommendation for Architectural Smells
ESEM - Emerging Results and Vision Track
Samal Nursapa Mälardalen University, Anastassiya Samuilova Mälardalen University, Alessio Bucaioni Malardalen University, Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila
Pre-print
10:00
20m
Talk
How Do Community Smells Influence Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Machine Learning Projects?
ESEM - Technical Track
Shamse Tasnim Cynthia University of Saskatchewan, Nuri Almarimi University of Saskatchewan, Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan
10:20
20m
Talk
Mapping Code Smells and Refactorings Accurately: Insights from an Empirical Study
ESEM - Technical Track
Gautam Shetty Dalhousie University, Tushar Sharma Dalhousie University
Pre-print
10:40
20m
Talk
On the Harmfulness of Test Smells in Manual System Testing: A Controlled Experiment
ESEM - Technical Track
Gabriela Soares Federal University of Alagoas, Vanessa Santos Federal University of Alagoas, Márcio Ribeiro Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil, Luana Martins University of Salerno, Valeria Pontillo Gran Sasso Science Institute, Manoel Aranda III Federal University of Alagoas, Rohit Gheyi Federal University of Campina Grande, Ivan Machado , Fabio Palomba University of Salerno