SMART
'Software Engineering' as imagined by 'Microsoft Bing Create'.

Welcome to the Software Maintenance and Analytics Research Team (SMART lab), established at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Dalhousie University. The lab is lead by Tushar Sharma. We research, develop, and disseminate methods, tools, techniques associated with Software engineering (specifically software design and architecture, code quality, refactoring, technical debt, and program comprehension) and machine learning techniques for software engineering applications.


News

  • Grant - Mitacs Accelerate: "Exploring the connection between internal and external software quality attributes" ($225K); industry partner: Spokesfan, Mar 2024.
  • Technical briefing - "LLMs for code: the potential, prospects, and problems", Accepted in International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) 2024.
  • Publication - "Pursuit of Energy-efficient AI: Benchmarking Emerging Neural Network Quantization Methods", Accepted in GREENS 2024.
  • Grant - Mitacs Accelerate: "Subsystem Optimization of Intelligent Automated Distribution Kiosk" ($15K), Mar 2024.
  • Publication - "Greenlight: Highlighting TensorFlow APIs Energy Footprint", Accepted in MSR (Data/Tools track) 2024. Preprint
  • Publication - "Multi-faceted Code Smell Detection at Scale using DesigniteJava 2.0". Accepted in MSR (Data/Tools track) 2024. Preprint
  • Publication - "A Survey on Machine Learning Techniques Applied to Source Code", Accepted in Journal of Systems and Software, Dec 2023. Preprint
  • Publication - "Naturalness of Attention: Revisiting Attention in Code Language Models", Accepted in ICSE (NIER), Nov 2023. Preprint
  • Award - Best artifact award for SCAM 2023 - "Calibrating Deep Learning-based Code Smell Detection using Human Feedback"
  • Grant - Lab2Market grant for CoderGate, Sept 2023.
  • Publication - "Calibrating Deep Learning-based Code Smell Detection using Human Feedback", Accepted in IEEE SCAM, Aug 2023. Preprint
  • Publication - "Mining and Fusing Productivity Metrics with Code Quality Information at Scale", Accepted in IEEE ICSME (Tools track), Aug 2023. Preprint
  • Publication - "Automatic Refactoring Candidate Identification Leveraging Effective Code Representation", Accepted in IEEE ICSME (NIER track), Aug 2023. Preprint
  • Publication - "Investigating Developers' Perception on Software Testability and its Effects". Accepted in Empirical Software Engineering Journal, Jul 2023. Preprint
  • Grant - Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) accepted to fund "Transforming Climate Action: Addressing the Missing Ocean" for $154 million for the next seven years. Glad to be one of the 170 researchers' team from Dalhousie to participate in this program.
  • Grant, Discovery grant - "DevQOps: A Continuous Software Quality Assurance Framework", Accepted to be funded for five years by NSERC, Apr 2023
  • Publication - "DACOS-A Manually Annotated Dataset of Code Smells", Mar 2023, Accepted at MSR 2023 (dataset and tools track).
  • Grant - Lab2Market grant for QConnect, Jan 2023.
  • Publication - "Green AI: Do Deep Learning Frameworks Have Different Costs?", Dec 2021, Accepted at ICSE 2022 (Research track). Preprint
  • Publication - "Lessons from Research to Practice on Writing Better Quality Puppet Scripts". in SANER, 2022. Preprint

Sponsors and collaborators