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Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE '15

Michele Tufano and Denys PoshyvanykMichele Tufano and his doctoral adviser, Professor Denys Poshyvanyk, shared in an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (May 16-24, 2015).  Their paper, When and Why Your Code Starts to Smell Bad, was co-authored with Fabio Palomba, Gabriele Bavota, Rocco Oliveto, Massimiliano Di Penta, and Andrea De Lucia. 

This paper investigates when and why “bad smells” (symptoms of poor software design or implementation) creep into software projects.  To do so they examined over 579,000 software changes in 200 projects.  Some of their findings ran counter to conventional wisdom.  For instance, rather than problems creeping in gradually through incremental changes, symptoms of problems were frequently evident from the inception of pieces of code.

Michele entered the Ph.D. program at William and Mary in Fall 2014.  Previously he received a Masters in Computer Science cum laude from the University of Salerno.

Reference:  M. Tufano, F. Palomba, G. Bavota, R. Di Penta, A. De Lucia, and D. Poshyvanyk, When and Why Your Code Starts to Smell Bad, in Proceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’15), Florence, Italy, May 16-24, 2015.