The widespread use of smartphones has dictated a new paradigm, where mobile applications are the primary channel for dealing with day-to-day tasks. This paradigm is full of sensitive information, making security of utmost importance. To that end, and given the traditional authentication techniques (passwords and/or unlock patterns) which have become ineffective, several research efforts are targeted towards biometrics security, while more advanced techniques are considering continuous implicit authentication on the basis of behavioral biometrics. However, most studies in this direction are performed “in vitro” resulting in small-scale experimentation. In this context, and in an effort to create a solid information basis upon which continuous authentication models can be built, we employ the real-world application “BrainRun”, a brain-training game aiming at boosting cognitive skills of individuals. BrainRun embeds a gestures capturing tool, so that the different types of gestures that describe the swiping behavior of users are recorded and thus can be modeled. Upon releasing the application at both the “Google Play Store” and “Apple App Store”, we construct a dataset containing gestures and sensors data for more than 2000 different users and devices. The dataset is distributed under the CC0 license and can be found at the EU Zenodo repository.

Nowadays, agile software development is considered a mainstream approach for software with fast release cycles and frequent changes in requirements. Most of the time, high velocity in software development implies poor software quality, especially when it comes to maintainability. In this work, we argue that ensuring the maintainability of a software component is not the result of a one-time only (or few-times only) set of fixes that eliminate technical debt, but the result of a continuous process across the software’s life cycle. We propose a maintainability evaluation methodology, where data residing in code hosting platforms are being used in order to identify non-maintainable software classes. Upon detecting classes that have been dropped from their project, we examine the progressing behavior of their static analysis metrics and evaluate maintainability upon the four primary source code properties: complexity, cohesion, inheritance and coupling. The evaluation of our methodology upon various axes, both qualitative and quantitative, indicates that our approach can provide actionable and interpretable maintainability evaluation at class level and identify non-maintainable components around 50% ahead of the software life cycle. Based on these results, we argue that the progressing behavior of static analysis metrics at a class level can provide valuable information about the maintainability degree of the component in time.

Code readability is critical to software development and has a significant impact on maintenance and collaboration in evolving technology landscapes. With the increasing complexity of projects and the diversity of developers’ coding styles, the need for automated tools to improve code readability has become more apparent. This paper presents an innovative automated system designed to improve code readability by modeling and enforcing consistent formatting standards. The approach uses techniques such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and N-gram models, allowing the system to adapt to different coding styles and preferences. The system works autonomously by analyzing code styling within a project, identifying deviations from established standards and providing actionable recommendations for consistent styling. To validate our approach, several evaluations were performed on a large dataset of Java files. The results demonstrate the system’s effectiveness in detecting and correcting formatting errors, identifying a formatting error within the first five predictions more than 90% of the time, while providing the correct fix nearly 96% of the time, regardless of formatting convention or programming language. By offering a solution tailored to the specific needs of different teams, our system represents a significant advance in automated code formatting and readability improvement.

The availability of code snippets in online repositories like GitHub has led to an uptick in code reuse, this way further supporting an open-source component-based development paradigm. The likelihood of code reuse rises when the code components or snippets are of high quality, especially in terms of readability, making their integration and upkeep simpler. Toward this direction, we have developed a dataset of code snippets that takes into account both the functional and the quality characteristics of the snippets. The dataset is based on the CodeSearchNet corpus and comprises additional information, including static analysis metrics, code violations, readability assessments, and source code similarity metrics. Thus, using this dataset, both software researchers and practitioners can conveniently find and employ code snippets that satisfy diverse functional needs while also demonstrating excellent readability and maintainability.