arXiv subjects

Sherlock A. Licorish

Publications and source records attributed to Sherlock A. Licorish.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

At What Cost? Software Developers' Well-Being in the Age of GenAI

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping software development, with growing emphasis on accelerating productivity and optimizing performance. However, excessive focus on such dimensions risks overlooking the critical implications for developer well-being. GenAI tools can amplify cognitive load, introduce new forms of oversight labor, and escalate expectations around output and pace, contributing to stress, burnout, and diminished work-life balance. The GenAI movement is also transforming professional norms, altering career entry points, demanding continuous adaptation, and deepening inequalities in access and support. This position paper calls for a reorientation of the GenAI research agenda in software development and proposes a theoretical framework to move beyond narrow performance metrics toward investigations that also center on human experience, social context, and sustainable productivity.

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arXiv2026

Geographic Variation in Stack Overflow Code Quality: Evidence from a Cross-Regional Study of Coding Practices

Developers frequently reuse Stack Overflow code snippets, yet the quality of these snippets remains unevenly understood, particularly across programming languages and geographic contexts. This study investigates code quality in Stack Overflow answers from contributors located in the United States, focusing on SQL, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Java snippets. We evaluate four quality dimensions: reliability, readability, performance, and security. Using language-specific linting and static analysis tools, we quantify violations across states and cities, compute violation densities to enable fair regional comparison, and examine relationships between code quality and state-level diversity indicators. We further conduct inductive content analysis on code snippets from California, Utah, and North Dakota to identify qualitative patterns in code quality violations. Results show that readability violations are the most prevalent across all languages, followed by reliability, performance, and security. Common issues include improper whitespace, inconsistent formatting, program-flow errors, inefficient resource use, unsanitised inputs, and insecure dynamic evaluation. Regional analysis indicates that major technology hubs produce more parsable snippets but do not necessarily exhibit higher violation densities. States with broader access to computing devices, Internet subscriptions, higher income, and more equitable wealth distribution tend to show fewer code quality violations. Qualitative findings suggest that established technology regions often produce more complex violations, while less mature technology regions display more fundamental errors. These findings highlight the socio-technical nature of code quality in community question-answering platforms and suggest that developers should exercise caution when reusing online code snippets.

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arXiv2026

A Pilot Study on Detecting Software Design Patterns with Large Language Models: An Empirical Evaluation

Design patterns provide reusable solutions to recurring software design problems. Automatically detecting these patterns in source code can help bootstrap new developers' understanding of unfamiliar software system architectures, and can help experienced developers to quickly identify and rectify potential quality issues. While many prior research works have explored graph based and machine-learning based detection techniques, this work evaluates the design pattern recognition capabilities of four Large Language Models and two ensemble approaches consisting three out of the four models. We also compare their performance when prompted with a) Source code, b) PlantUML representation of source code, and c) Text-based descriptions of the source code. We investigate the detection of five design patterns: singleton, adapter, bridge, composite and decorator. Our preliminary results indicate that LLMs show promise for automatically detecting design patterns, with NextCoder and Gemma 3 demonstrating comparatively higher accuracy than other models evaluated, and the ensemble approaches enhancing the overall efficiency of design pattern detection. We identify several directions for future work.

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arXiv2026

The Future of Software Engineering Conferences: A New Zealand Perspective

Software engineering (SE) conferences are vital for knowledge exchange and collaboration, yet can also involve significant barriers for researchers in geographically distant regions such as New Zealand. We identify barriers such as high travel costs, misaligned academic calendars, and limited representation, and propose strategies including hybrid participation, cost-conscious venues, and governance reforms. We make recommendations to promote equitable global participation and strengthen the SE research community.

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arXiv2026

Why Do You Contribute to Stack Overflow? Understanding Cross-Cultural Motivations and Usage Patterns before the Age of LLMs

Understanding motivations of contributors for participating in community question and answer platforms is crucial for sustaining knowledge-sharing ecosystem, which is necessary to advance the discipline while also ensuring its longevity. This is particularly necessary in the age of LLMs, where data from such portals are used to train these models. Limited insights exist regarding how motivations of contributors vary across different national cultures. This research investigates Stack Overflow contributor motivations, analysing regional differences and relations to platform activity. We combined qualitative content analysis of Stack Overflow profiles with quantitative linguistic analysis of data from the United States, China, and Russia. Using deductive content analysis, we identified 17 motivational categories. We applied correlation analysis to identify associations between stated motivations and platform activities. Contributors are primarily motivated by advertising opportunities and altruistic problem solving desires. American contributors demonstrated stronger self promotional behaviours while Chinese contributors exhibited greater learning oriented engagement. Our correlation analysis showed that those with more detailed profiles tend to engage in advertising and social activities, while learning oriented users maintain minimal self presentation. Understanding these variations can inform strategies for enhancing cross cultural participation in software engineering.

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arXiv2026

Taking a Closer Look at Warnings Generated by PMD and SonarQube, their Rules and Compliance to Established Coding Standards

Context: Static code analysis (SCA) tools play a vital role in software development, reducing the cost and time required for code reviews. However, high false-positive and false-negative rates are reported for the best tools in the community. Accordingly, studies often aim to develop datasets for learning SCA warning patterns to reduce false results. These datasets are meant to possess high-quality and high-volume in covering the full range of faults/rules that typically result in false warnings and be compliant with established coding standards. However, existing studies have not utilised such datasets or identified the breadth of rules that are prone to false positives and their compliance to coding standards. Objectives: We analysed code from Stack Overflow and Apache Tomcat to capture variations in code length and style in detecting false-positive warnings from best-performing tools PMD and SonarQube, addressing this gap. Method: In deriving false-positive warnings, outcomes from the tools were labelled using established coding standards. Deeper analyses were then conducted to identify the rules that are prone to false-positives, reasons for these, and agreement/gaps between SCA rules and established standards. Results: Among our main outcomes, we observe that only a few SCA rules generate false positives, ranging from 4.64% to 18.45% across four datasets. Additionally, eliminating rules that contradict established standards significantly reduce the false-positive rate. Additionally, our findings reveal discrepancies between tools and established standards. Conclusion: Given the evidence established in this study, we recommend further investigations into gaps between tools and established standards, including the use of machine learning approaches to annotate larger datasets.

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arXiv2025

On the need to perform comprehensive evaluations of automated program repair benchmarks: Sorald case study

In supporting the development of high-quality software, especially necessary in the era of LLMs, automated program repair (APR) tools aim to improve code quality by automatically addressing violations detected by static analysis profilers. Previous research tends to evaluate APR tools only for their ability to clear violations, neglecting their potential introduction of new (sometimes severe) violations, changes to code functionality and degrading of code structure. There is thus a need for research to develop and assess comprehensive evaluation frameworks for APR tools. This study addresses this research gap, and evaluates Sorald (a state-of-the-art APR tool) as a proof of concept. Sorald's effectiveness was evaluated in repairing 3,529 SonarQube violations across 30 rules within 2,393 Java code snippets extracted from Stack Overflow. Outcomes show that while Sorald fixes specific rule violations, it introduced 2,120 new faults (32 bugs, 2088 code smells), reduced code functional correctness--as evidenced by a 24% unit test failure rate--and degraded code structure, demonstrating the utility of our framework. Findings emphasize the need for evaluation methodologies that capture the full spectrum of APR tool effects, including side effects, to ensure their safe and effective adoption.

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arXiv2025

Static Analysis as a Feedback Loop: Enhancing LLM-Generated Code Beyond Correctness

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation, achieving high scores on benchmarks such as HumanEval and MBPP. However, these benchmarks primarily assess functional correctness and neglect broader dimensions of code quality, including security, reliability, readability, and maintainability. In this work, we systematically evaluate the ability of LLMs to generate high-quality code across multiple dimensions using the PythonSecurityEval benchmark. We introduce an iterative static analysis-driven prompting algorithm that leverages Bandit and Pylint to identify and resolve code quality issues. Our experiments with GPT-4o show substantial improvements: security issues reduced from >40% to 13%, readability violations from >80% to 11%, and reliability warnings from >50% to 11% within ten iterations. These results demonstrate that LLMs, when guided by static analysis feedback, can significantly enhance code quality beyond functional correctness.

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arXiv2025

Predictive Analytics for Collaborators Answers, Code Quality, and Dropout on Stack Overflow

Previous studies that used data from Stack Overflow to develop predictive models often employed limited benchmarks of 3-5 models or adopted arbitrary selection methods. Despite being insightful, their limited scope suggests the need to benchmark more models to avoid overlooking untested algorithms. Our study evaluates 21 algorithms across three tasks: predicting the number of question a user is likely to answer, their code quality violations, and their dropout status. We employed normalisation, standardisation, as well as logarithmic and power transformations paired with Bayesian hyperparameter optimisation and genetic algorithms. CodeBERT, a pre-trained language model for both natural and programming languages, was fine-tuned to classify user dropout given their posts (questions and answers) and code snippets. We found Bagging ensemble models combined with standardisation achieved the highest R2 value (0.821) in predicting user answers. The Stochastic Gradient Descent regressor, followed by Bagging and Epsilon Support Vector Machine models, consistently demonstrated superior performance to other benchmarked algorithms in predicting user code quality across multiple quality dimensions and languages. Extreme Gradient Boosting paired with log-transformation exhibited the highest F1-score (0.825) in predicting user dropout. CodeBERT was able to classify user dropout with a final F1-score of 0.809, validating the performance of Extreme Gradient Boosting that was solely based on numerical data. Overall, our benchmarking of 21 algorithms provides multiple insights. Researchers can leverage findings regarding the most suitable models for specific target variables, and practitioners can utilise the identified optimal hyperparameters to reduce the initial search space during their own hyperparameter tuning processes.

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arXiv2025

GBM Returns the Best Prediction Performance among Regression Approaches: A Case Study of Stack Overflow Code Quality

Practitioners are increasingly dependent on publicly available resources for supporting their knowledge needs during software development. This has thus caused a spotlight to be paced on these resources, where researchers have reported mixed outcomes around the quality of these resources. Stack Overflow, in particular, has been studied extensively, with evidence showing that code resources on this platform can be of poor quality at times. Limited research has explored the variables or factors that predict code quality on Stack Overflow, but instead has focused on ranking content, identifying defects and predicting future content. In many instances approaches used for prediction are not evaluated to identify the best techniques. Contextualizing the Stack Overflow code quality problem as regression-based, we examined the variables that predict Stack Overflow (Java) code quality, and the regression approach that provides the best predictive power. Six approaches were considered in our evaluation, where Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) stood out. In addition, longer Stack Overflow code tended to have more code violations, questions that were scored higher also attracted more views and the more answers that are added to questions on Stack Overflow the more errors were typically observed in the code that was provided. Outcomes here point to the value of the GBM ensemble learning mechanism, and the need for the practitioner community to be prudent when contributing and reusing Stack Overflow Java coding resource.

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arXiv2025

Comparing Human and LLM Generated Code: The Jury is Still Out!

Much is promised in relation to AI-supported software development. However, there has been limited evaluation effort in the research domain aimed at validating the true utility of such techniques, especially when compared to human coding outputs. We bridge this gap, where a benchmark dataset comprising 72 distinct software engineering tasks is used to compare the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) and human programmers in producing Python software code. GPT-4 is used as a representative LLM, where for the code generated by humans and this LLM, we evaluate code quality and adherence to Python coding standards, code security and vulnerabilities, code complexity and functional correctness. We use various static analysis benchmarks, including Pylint, Radon, Bandit and test cases. Among the notable outcomes, results show that human-generated code recorded higher ratings for adhering to coding standards than GPT-4. We observe security flaws in code generated by both humans and GPT-4, however, code generated by humans shows a greater variety of problems, but GPT-4 code included more severe outliers. Our results show that although GPT-4 is capable of producing coding solutions, it frequently produces more complex code that may need more reworking to ensure maintainability. On the contrary however, our outcomes show that a higher number of test cases passed for code generated by GPT-4 across a range of tasks than code that was generated by humans. That said, GPT-4 frequently struggles with complex problem-solving that involve in-depth domain knowledge. This study highlights the potential utility of LLMs for supporting software development, however, tasks requiring comprehensive, innovative or unconventional solutions, and careful debugging and error correction seem to be better developed by human programmers. We plot an agenda for the software engineering community.

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arXiv2023

Features that Predict the Acceptability of Java and JavaScript Answers on Stack Overflow

Context: Stack Overflow is a popular community question and answer portal used by practitioners to solve problems during software development. Developers can focus their attention on answers that have been accepted or where members have recorded high votes in judging good answers when searching for help. However, the latter mechanism (votes) can be unreliable, and there is currently no way to differentiate between an answer that is likely to be accepted and those that will not be accepted by looking at the answer's characteristics. Objective: In potentially providing a mechanism to identify acceptable answers, this study examines the features that distinguish an accepted answer from an unaccepted answer. Methods: We studied the Stack Overflow dataset by analyzing questions and answers for the two most popular tags (Java and JavaScript). Our dataset comprised 249,588 posts drawn from 2014-2016. We use random forest and neural network models to predict accepted answers, and study the features with the highest predictive power in those two models. Results: Our findings reveal that the length of code in answers, reputation of users, similarity of the text between questions and answers, and the time lag between questions and answers have the highest predictive power for differentiating accepted and unaccepted answers. Conclusion: Tools may leverage these findings in supporting developers and reducing the effort they must dedicate to searching for suitable answers on Stack Overflow.

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arXiv2023

Studying the Characteristics of SQL-related Development Tasks: An Empirical Study

A key function of a software system is its ability to facilitate the manipulation of data, which is often implemented using a flavour of the Structured Query Language (SQL). To develop the data operations of software (i.e, creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting data), developers are required to excel in writing and combining both SQL and application code. The problem is that writing SQL code in itself is already challenging (e.g., SQL anti-patterns are commonplace) and combining SQL with application code (i.e., for SQL development tasks) is even more demanding. Meanwhile, we have little empirical understanding regarding the characteristics of SQL development tasks. Do SQL development tasks typically need more code changes? Do they typically have a longer time-to-completion? Answers to such questions would prepare the community for the potential challenges associated with such tasks. Our results obtained from 20 Apache projects reveal that SQL development tasks have a significantly longer time-to-completion than SQL-unrelated tasks and require significantly more code changes. Through our qualitative analyses, we observe that SQL development tasks require more spread out changes, effort in reviews and documentation. Our results also corroborate previous research highlighting the prevalence of SQL anti-patterns. The software engineering community should make provision for the peculiarities of SQL coding, in the delivery of safe and secure interactive software.

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arXiv2022

A Systematic Mapping Study Addressing the Reliability of Mobile Applications: The Need to Move Beyond Testing Reliability

Intense competition in the mobile apps market means it is important to maintain high levels of app reliability to avoid losing users. Yet despite its importance, app reliability is underexplored in the research literature. To address this need, we identify, analyse, and classify the state-of-the-art in the field of mobile apps' reliability through a systematic mapping study. From the results of such a study, researchers in the field can identify pressing research gaps, and developers can gain knowledge about existing solutions, to potentially leverage them in practice. We found 87 relevant papers which were then analysed and classified based on their research focus, research type, contribution, research method, study settings, data, quality attributes and metrics used. Results indicate that there is a lack of research on understanding reliability with regard to context-awareness, self-healing, ageing and rejuvenation, and runtime event handling. These aspects have rarely been studied, or if studied, there is limited evaluation. We also identified several other research gaps including the need to conduct more research in real-world industrial projects. Furthermore, little attention has been paid towards quality standards while conducting research. Outcomes here show numerous opportunities for greater research depth and breadth on mobile app reliability.

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arXiv2022

Software Engineering in Australasia

Six months ago an important call was made for researchers globally to provide insights into the way Software Engineering is done in their region. Heeding this call we hereby outline the position Software Engineering in Australasia (New Zealand and Australia). This article first considers the software development methods practices and tools that are popular in the Australasian software engineering community. We then briefly review the particular strengths of software engineering researchers in Australasia. Finally we make an open call for collaborators by reflecting on our current position and identifying future opportunities

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arXiv2022

On the Utility of Marrying GIN and PMD for Improving Stack Overflow Code Snippets

Software developers are increasingly dependent on question and answer portals and blogs for coding solutions. While such interfaces provide useful information, there are concerns that code hosted here is often incorrect, insecure or incomplete. Previous work indeed detected a range of faults in code provided on Stack Overflow through the use of static analysis. Static analysis may go a far way towards quickly establishing the health of software code available online. In addition, mechanisms that enable rapid automated program improvement may then enhance such code. Accordingly, we present this proof of concept. We use the PMD static analysis tool to detect performance faults for a sample of Stack Overflow Java code snippets, before performing mutations on these snippets using GIN. We then re-analyse the performance faults in these snippets after the GIN mutations. GIN's RandomSampler was used to perform 17,986 unique line and statement patches on 3,034 snippets where PMD violations were removed from 770 patched versions. Our outcomes indicate that static analysis techniques may be combined with automated program improvement methods to enhance publicly available code with very little resource requirements. We discuss our planned research agenda in this regard.

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arXiv2022

Investigating Expectation Violations in Mobile Apps

Information technology and software services are pervasive, occupying the centre of most aspects of contemporary societies. This has given rise to commonly expected norms and expectations around how such systems should work, appropriate penalties for violating these expectations, and more importantly, indicators of how to reduce the consequences of violations and sanctions. Evidence for expectation violations and ensuing sanctions exists in a range of portals used by individuals and groups to start new friendships, explore new ideas, and provide feedback for products and services. Therein lies insights that could lead to functional socio-technical systems, and general awareness and anticipations of human actions (and interactions) when using information technology and software services. However, limited previous work has examined such artifacts to provide these understandings. To contribute to such understandings and theoretical advancement we study expectation violations in mobile apps, considered among the most engaging socio-technical systems. We used content analysis and expectancy violation theory (EVT) and expectation confirmation theory (ECT) to explore the evidence and nature of sanctions in app reviews for a specific domain of apps. Our outcomes show that users respond to expectation violation with sanctions when their app does not work as anticipated, developers seem to target specific market niches when providing services in an app domain, and users within an app domain respond with similar sanctions. We contribute to the advancement of expectation violation theories, and we provide practical insights for the mobile app community.

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arXiv2021

What Makes Agile Software Development Agile?

Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15%). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.

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