arXiv subjects

Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto

Publications and source records attributed to Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Automated Detection of Configuration-Specific Security Vulnerabilities via Patch Analysis

We study how security patches in highly configurable C/C++ systems map onto the space of compile-time variants. We formalize the Vulnerability Impact Condition (VIC) - a Boolean predicate over configuration options that denotes all variants that contained the original flaw - and introduce PatchLens, a purely static technique that recovers VICs by aligning AST-level patch hunks with source-level presence conditions and resolving file inclusion via lightweight build system analysis. Evaluating PatchLens on 1,192 Linux kernel, 289 FFmpeg, and 100 PHP patches, we compute precise, human-readable VICs without the need to compile any system variant. The resulting predicates are compact (avg. 1.84 variables for Linux, 3.23 for FFmpeg, 1.04 for PHP) and show that only a small fraction of vulnerabilities are system-wide, which carry higher CVSS scores; meanwhile, CVE texts almost never encode the required options ($\approx$ 1% average recall), motivating automated enrichment of CVE descriptions with VICs. PatchLens and the accompanying dataset enable immediate applications in CI (variant-aware triage and test selection), targeted sampling and fuzzing, and feature risk scoring, offering a scalable, explainable path to vulnerability assessment in highly configurable software.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Evaluating LLMs Effectiveness in Detecting and Correcting Test Smells: An Empirical Study

Test smells indicate poor development practices in test code, reducing maintainability and reliability. While developers often struggle to prevent or refactor these issues, existing tools focus primarily on detection rather than automated refactoring. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in code understanding and transformation, but their ability to both identify and refactor test smells remains underexplored. We evaluated GPT-4-Turbo, LLaMA 3 70B, and Gemini-1.5 Pro on Python and Java test suites, using PyNose and TsDetect for initial smell detection, followed by LLM-driven refactoring. Gemini achieved the highest detection accuracy (74.35\% Python, 80.32\% Java), while LLaMA was lowest. All models could refactor smells, but effectiveness varied, sometimes introducing new smells. Gemini also improved test coverage, unlike GPT-4 and LLaMA, which often reduced it. These results highlight LLMs' potential for automated test smell refactoring, with Gemini as the strongest performer, though challenges remain across languages and smell types.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Please do not go: understanding turnover of software engineers from different perspectives

Turnover consists of moving into and out of professional employees in the company in a given period. Such a phenomenon significantly impacts the software industry since it generates knowledge loss, delays in the schedule, and increased costs in the final project. Despite the efforts made by researchers and professionals to minimize the turnover, more studies are needed to understand the motivation that drives Software Engineers to leave their jobs and the main strategies CEOs adopt to retain these professionals in software development companies. In this paper, we contribute a mixed methods study involving semi-structured interviews with Software Engineers and CEOs to obtain a wider opinion of these professionals about turnover and a subsequent validation survey with additional software engineers to check and review the insights from interviews. In studying such aspects, we identified 19 different reasons for software engineers' turnover and 18 more efficient strategies used in the software development industry to reduce it. Our findings provide several implications for industry and academia, which can drive future research.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Bug Analysis in Jupyter Notebook Projects: An Empirical Study

Computational notebooks, such as Jupyter, have been widely adopted by data scientists to write code for analyzing and visualizing data. Despite their growing adoption and popularity, there has been no thorough study to understand Jupyter development challenges from the practitioners' point of view. This paper presents a systematic study of bugs and challenges that Jupyter practitioners face through a large-scale empirical investigation. We mined 14,740 commits from 105 GitHub open-source projects with Jupyter notebook code. Next, we analyzed 30,416 Stack Overflow posts which gave us insights into bugs that practitioners face when developing Jupyter notebook projects. Finally, we conducted nineteen interviews with data scientists to uncover more details about Jupyter bugs and to gain insights into Jupyter developers' challenges. We propose a bug taxonomy for Jupyter projects based on our results. We also highlight bug categories, their root causes, and the challenges that Jupyter practitioners face.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

A Deep Dive on the Impact of COVID-19 in Software Development

Context: COVID-19 pandemic has impacted different business sectors around the world. Objective. This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 on software projects and software development professionals. Method: We conducted a mining software repository study based on 100 GitHub projects developed in Java using ten different metrics. Next, we surveyed 279 software development professionals for better understanding the impact of COVID-19 on daily activities and wellbeing. Results: We identified 12 observations related to productivity, code quality, and wellbeing. Conclusions: Our findings highlight that the impact of COVID-19 is not binary (reduce productivity vs. increase productivity) but rather a spectrum. For many of our observations, substantial proportions of respondents have differing opinions from each other. We believe that more research is needed to uncover specific conditions that cause certain outcomes to be more prevalent.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2013

A Systematic Mapping Study on Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing emerges from the global economic crisis as an option to use computing resources from a more rational point of view. In other words, a cheaper way to have IT resources. However, issues as security and privacy, SLA (Service Layer Agreement), resource sharing, and billing has left open questions about the real gains of that model. This study aims to investigate state-of-the-art in Cloud Computing, identify gaps, challenges, synthesize available evidences both its use and development, and provides relevant information, clarifying open questions and common discussed issues about that model through literature. The good practices of systematic map- ping study methodology were adopted in order to reach those objectives. Al- though Cloud Computing is based on a business model with over 50 years of existence, evidences found in this study indicate that Cloud Computing still presents limitations that prevent the full use of the proposal on-demand.

cs.DC↗