João Brunet | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Code Smells in Clojure: Initial Findings from a Grey Literature Review

Code smells are widely used indicators of poor code quality, revealing structural problems and areas where improvement can be made. Although extensively studied in object-oriented languages, functional programming languages remain comparatively underexplored in literature. This paper presents early results from a grey literature investigation of code smells in Clojure, a modern functional programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and is widely adopted in open source and industrial systems. Inspired by prior work on Elixir, we manually inspected developer discussions retrieved through Google search, extracted quality concerns discussed by developers, and had 44 practitioners evaluate the relevance of non-traditional smell candidates. As preliminary results, we cataloged 26 code smells, including 12 Clojure-specific, 9 functional-style, and 5 traditional Fowler smells. We also analyzed tool support and observed a significant gap, as existing Clojure linters cover only 2 of these 26 smells. These early findings provide an initial characterization of how Clojure developers discuss code smells, a preliminary set of smell-like problems specific to this ecosystem, and an early assessment of tool support for their detection.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

A Defect Taxonomy for Infrastructure as Code: A Replication Study

Background: As Infrastructure as Code (IaC) becomes standard practice, ensuring the reliability of IaC scripts is essential. Defect taxonomies are valuable tools for this, offering a common language for issues and enabling systematic tracking. A significant prior study developed such a taxonomy, but based it exclusively on the declarative language Puppet. It remained unknown whether this taxonomy applies to programming language-based IaC (PL-IaC) tools like Pulumi, Terraform CDK, and AWS CDK. Aim: We replicated this foundational work to assess the generalizability of the taxonomy across a broader and more diverse landscape. Method: We performed qualitative analysis on 3,364 defect-related commits from 285 open-source PL-IaC repositories (PIPr dataset) to derive a PL-IaC-specific defect taxonomy. We then enhanced the ACID tool, originally developed for the prior study, to automatically classify and analyze defect distributions across an expanded dataset-447 open-source repositories and 94 proprietary projects from VTEX (e-commerce) and Nubank (financial). Results: Our research confirmed the same eight defect categories identified in the original study, with idempotency and security defects appearing infrequently but persistently across projects. Configuration Data defects maintain high frequency in both open-source and proprietary codebases. Conclusions: Our replication supports the generalizability of the original taxonomy, suggesting IaC development challenges surpass organizational boundaries. Configuration Data defects emerge as a persistent high-frequency problem, while idempotency and security defects remain important concerns despite lower frequency. These patterns appear consistent across open-source and proprietary projects, indicating they are fundamental to the IaC paradigm itself, transcending specific tools or project types.

cs.SE↗