Year
2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
School of Computing and Information Technology
Abstract
The modern scene of software development experiences an exponential growth in the number of software projects, applications and code-bases. As software increases substantially in both size and complexity, software engineers face significant challenges in developing and maintaining high-quality software applications. Therefore, support in the form of automated techniques and tools is much needed to accelerate development productivity and improve software quality.
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to bring such support and significantly transform the practices of software development. This thesis explores the use of AI in developing automated support for improving three aspects of software quality: software documentation, technical debt and software defects. We leverage a large amount of data from software projects and repositories to provide actionable insights and reliable support. Using cutting-edge machine/deep learning technologies, we develop a novel suite of automated techniques and models for pseudo-code documentation generation, technical debt identification, description and repayment, and patch generation for software defects. We conducted a number of intensive empirical evaluations which show the high effectiveness of our approach.
Recommended Citation
Alhefdhi, Abdulaziz Hasan M., Developing AI-Powered Support for Improving Software Quality, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong, 2024. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses1/1778
FoR codes (2020)
460501 Data engineering and data science, 461103 Deep learning, 461201 Automated software engineering, 461207 Software quality, processes and metrics
Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.