Journal of Software-Evolution and Process最新文献

{"title":"The Agile Coach Role Decoded: What Agile Coaches Deliver Versus What Team Members Experience","authors":"Konstantinos Koumaditis,&nbsp;Philip Harder,&nbsp;Bjarke Stokholm Hestbæk,&nbsp;Maja Due Kadenic,&nbsp;Lasse F. Lui","doi":"10.1002/smr.70107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.70107","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As organizations increasingly adopt agile methodologies to navigate digital transformation, the role of the agile coach has emerged as a critical yet ambiguously defined element of success. This exploratory study investigates agile coaching from a dual perspective, coaches and team members, to better understand the approaches, tools, and perceptions that shape coaching effectiveness. Drawing on survey data from 301 respondents, the study reveals both alignment and divergence in how coaching roles, success characteristics, accountability, and performance metrics are perceived. While both groups value interpersonal skills and team accountability, team members tend to seek more directive support and tangible outcomes, whereas coaches emphasize facilitation and systemic impact. The findings depict the need for more explicit role definitions, mutual expectation setting, and adaptive coaching strategies. Practical recommendations are proposed to bridge perceptual gaps and enhance coaching relationships. This research contributes to the evolving discourse on agile transformation by offering actionable insights for improving coaching alignment and team performance.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/smr.70107","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Agile Coach Role Decoded: What Agile Coaches Deliver Versus What Team Members Experience","authors":"Konstantinos Koumaditis,&nbsp;Philip Harder,&nbsp;Bjarke Stokholm Hestbæk,&nbsp;Maja Due Kadenic,&nbsp;Lasse F. Lui","doi":"10.1002/smr.70107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.70107","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As organizations increasingly adopt agile methodologies to navigate digital transformation, the role of the agile coach has emerged as a critical yet ambiguously defined element of success. This exploratory study investigates agile coaching from a dual perspective, coaches and team members, to better understand the approaches, tools, and perceptions that shape coaching effectiveness. Drawing on survey data from 301 respondents, the study reveals both alignment and divergence in how coaching roles, success characteristics, accountability, and performance metrics are perceived. While both groups value interpersonal skills and team accountability, team members tend to seek more directive support and tangible outcomes, whereas coaches emphasize facilitation and systemic impact. The findings depict the need for more explicit role definitions, mutual expectation setting, and adaptive coaching strategies. Practical recommendations are proposed to bridge perceptual gaps and enhance coaching relationships. This research contributes to the evolving discourse on agile transformation by offering actionable insights for improving coaching alignment and team performance.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/smr.70107","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Software Cost Estimation Using a Hybrid Deep Convolutional LSTM and Optimization Approach","authors":"Nitalaksheswara Rao Kolukula,&nbsp;Jhansi Vazram Bolla,&nbsp;Padma Yenuga,&nbsp;Nagul Shaik,&nbsp;James Stephen Meka","doi":"10.1002/smr.70097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.70097","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The importance of such software cost estimation (SCE) is that it can be relied upon in the planning and management of large software projects, especially when one is working in an environment that is dynamic and uncertain. The current models can be difficult to scale and model. In these respects, this paper will recommend a hybrid optimization–based deep convolutional LSTM (HO-DCLSTM) framework for solving an SCE. The proposed system takes the form of a deep learning model of a deep convolution LSTM to enhance cost estimates. The suggested solution combines a profound convolutional LSTM network and parameter refinement based on gazelle and Al-Biruni Earth radius optimization algorithms to increase the prediction accuracy of costs and reduce the computation load and volume. The suggested method generates a better solution, has a low cost of computing, and has the ability to locate the best solution. Three datasets are used to analyze the proposed method's performance based on NASA, COCOMO 81, and KEMERER data. The analysis of the results with these datasets shows that the proposed method has high performance with lower error rates and greater prediction accuracy when compared to other current methods.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Software Cost Estimation Using a Hybrid Deep Convolutional LSTM and Optimization Approach","authors":"Nitalaksheswara Rao Kolukula,&nbsp;Jhansi Vazram Bolla,&nbsp;Padma Yenuga,&nbsp;Nagul Shaik,&nbsp;James Stephen Meka","doi":"10.1002/smr.70097","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.70097","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The importance of such software cost estimation (SCE) is that it can be relied upon in the planning and management of large software projects, especially when one is working in an environment that is dynamic and uncertain. The current models can be difficult to scale and model. In these respects, this paper will recommend a hybrid optimization–based deep convolutional LSTM (HO-DCLSTM) framework for solving an SCE. The proposed system takes the form of a deep learning model of a deep convolution LSTM to enhance cost estimates. The suggested solution combines a profound convolutional LSTM network and parameter refinement based on gazelle and Al-Biruni Earth radius optimization algorithms to increase the prediction accuracy of costs and reduce the computation load and volume. The suggested method generates a better solution, has a low cost of computing, and has the ability to locate the best solution. Three datasets are used to analyze the proposed method's performance based on NASA, COCOMO 81, and KEMERER data. The analysis of the results with these datasets shows that the proposed method has high performance with lower error rates and greater prediction accuracy when compared to other current methods.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Graph Attention-Based Contextual Semantic Correlation Analysis for Software Fault Localization","authors":"Hongdou He,&nbsp;Xiaoming Ma,&nbsp;Huazhi Xu,&nbsp;Guyu Zhao","doi":"10.1002/smr.70103","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.70103","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;div&gt;\u0000 \u0000 &lt;p&gt;Although the advanced spectrum-based fault localization techniques introduce graph models to measure the faulty suspiciousness of entities, they still lack effective leverage of the contextual semantics of program units, making it difficult to reveal the complex causal relationships of bugs. Therefore, this paper proposes the &lt;b&gt;C&lt;/b&gt;ontextual &lt;b&gt;S&lt;/b&gt;emantic Coupling &lt;b&gt;C&lt;/b&gt;orrelation Analysis for the Software &lt;b&gt;F&lt;/b&gt;ault &lt;b&gt;L&lt;/b&gt;ocalization (CSCFL), employing semantic embedding and coupling correlation of contextual associations based on contextual embedding and graph attention mechanism. Based on the test coverage graph representation, the pre-trained self-attention embedding model encodes the entity embeddings considering context associations, fully mining the contextual information among program entities to obtain contextual feature representation. CSCFL introduces the graph attention network to learn the context semantic coupling correlation between entities. By analyzing the causal relationships and semantic collaborations that lead to faults, the context semantics analysis module automatically weights and aggregates the influence of contextual entities to generate more accurate fault feature representations, thereby improving localization effectiveness. The experimental results show that, with respect to Top-1, Top-3, and Top-5 metrics, the proposed method outperforms the baseline methods by &lt;span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;math&gt;\u0000 &lt;semantics&gt;\u0000 &lt;mrow&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;7&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;.&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;59&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;%&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;,&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mspace&gt;&lt;/mspace&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;4&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;.&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;73&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;%&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;/mrow&gt;\u0000 &lt;annotation&gt;$$ 7.59%,kern0.3em 4.73% $$&lt;/annotation&gt;\u0000 &lt;/semantics&gt;&lt;/math&gt;, and &lt;span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;math&gt;\u0000 &lt;semantics&gt;\u0000 &lt;mrow&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;1&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;.&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;41&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;%&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;/mrow&gt;\u0000 &lt;annotation&gt;$$ 1.41% $$&lt;/annotation&gt;\u0000 &lt;/semantics&gt;&lt;/math&gt;, respectively, and outperforms cutting-edge LLM-based methods by &lt;span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;math&gt;\u0000 &lt;semantics&gt;\u0000 &lt;mrow&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;9&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;.&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;10&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;%&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;,&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mspace&gt;&lt;/mspace&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;13&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;.&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;71&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;%&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;/mrow&gt;\u0000 &lt;annotation&gt;$$ 9.10%,kern0.3em 13.71% $$&lt;/annotation&gt;\u0000 &lt;/semantics&gt;&lt;/math&gt;, and &lt;span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;math&gt;\u0000 &lt;semantics&gt;\u0000 &lt;mrow&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;20&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;.&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;mn&gt;67&lt;/mn&gt;\u0000 &lt;mo&gt;%&lt;/mo&gt;\u0000 &lt;/mro","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward Platform Engineering, the Evolution of DevOps—A Systematic Mapping","authors":"Yohan Guisao,&nbsp;Elizabeth Suescún,&nbsp;Paola Noreña,&nbsp;César Pardo","doi":"10.1002/smr.70108","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.70108","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The evolution of software development can be traced parallel to the recent industrial revolutions, which have significantly changed modern society. Recent advancements have transformed how software is created, distributed, and utilized. In the digitalization of industry, software development is created by using innovative solutions for artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and more. Platform engineering evolves DevOps by integrating development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) for enhancing developer experience and accelerating customer value delivery. This paper maps the current landscape of platform engineering and its adoption across industries. Additionally, it also makes recommendations for further research for understanding, advancing the state of the art, and fostering the adoption of platform engineering within the software development industry.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Impact of Code Smells on Software Quality: A Systematic Literature Review","authors":"Zaineb Ameer,&nbsp;Muhammad Yaseen,&nbsp;Gohar Rahman,&nbsp;Umar Farooq Khattak,&nbsp;Sikandar Ali,&nbsp;Ahmed Alkhayyat,&nbsp;Samariddin Makhmudov,&nbsp;Mirjalol Ashurov","doi":"10.1002/smr.70091","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.70091","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 <section>\u0000 \u0000 <h3> Context</h3>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Code smells are issues in the code that can damage the code quality and adversely impact software quality attributes. The real effect of code smells on software development remains a subject of ongoing research.</p>\u0000 </section>\u0000 \u0000 <section>\u0000 \u0000 <h3> Objective</h3>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The main purpose of this study is to analyze and uncover the previous studies on how different code smells affect software quality. This study targets the most common factors of code smell.</p>\u0000 </section>\u0000 \u0000 <section>\u0000 \u0000 <h3> Method</h3>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study provides a systematic review on the code smells. SLR Protocol is designed and executed accordingly.</p>\u0000 </section>\u0000 \u0000 <section>\u0000 \u0000 <h3> Results</h3>\u0000 \u0000 <p>As a result of SLR, data were extracted from 42 research papers and as a result, a total of 11 code smells were identified. Identified code smells were analyzed based on their impact on different factors such as factors that are caused by these code smells such as why code smells are developed in software systems, how code smells generate other code smells, and which code smells still need to be addressed.</p>\u0000 </section>\u0000 \u0000 <section>\u0000 \u0000 <h3> Conclusion</h3>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study provided a systematic examination into the observation of code smells and their impacts on software development. The most affected factors from code smells are addressed in this research. The purpose of this research is to provide software developers and engineers with a complete understanding of code smells via SLR. Each study defines specific code smells and examines their effects on particular aspects of the code in previous research. The basic context to seeing the code smell is to find the nature and reliance of the code smell. In light of existing studies, a common issue identified by software professionals is that code smells have a significant impact on software quality, thereby degrading the overall quality of software products.</p>\u0000 </section>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Robotics Meets Software Engineering: A First Look at the Robotics Discussions on StackOverflow","authors":"Hisham Kidwai,&nbsp;Danika Passler Bates,&nbsp;Sujana Islam Suhi,&nbsp;Md Nahidul Islam Opu,&nbsp;James E. Young,&nbsp;Shaiful Chowdhury","doi":"10.1002/smr.70100","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.70100","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Robots can greatly enhance human capabilities, yet their development presents a range of challenges. This collaborative study, conducted by a team of software engineering and robotics researchers, seeks to identify the challenges encountered by robot developers by analyzing questions posted on StackOverflow. We created a filtered dataset of 500 robotics-related questions and examined their characteristics, comparing them with randomly selected questions from the platform. Our findings indicate that the small size of the robotics community limits the visibility of these questions, resulting in fewer responses. While the number of robotics questions has been steadily increasing, they remain less popular than the average question and answer on StackOverflow. This underscores the importance of research that focuses on the challenges faced by robotics practitioners. Consequently, we conducted a thematic analysis of the 500 robotics questions to uncover common inquiry patterns. We identified 11 major themes, with questions about robot movement being the most frequent. Our analysis of yearly trends revealed that certain themes, such as <i>Specifications</i>, were prominent from 2009 to 2014 but have since diminished in relevance. In contrast, themes like <i>Moving</i>, <i>Actuator</i>, and <i>Remote</i> have consistently dominated discussions over the years. These findings suggest that challenges in robotics may vary over time. Notably, the majority of robotics questions are framed as <i>How</i> questions, rather than <i>Why</i> or <i>What</i> questions, revealing the lack of enough resources for the practitioners. These insights can help guide researchers and educators in developing effective and timely educational materials for robotics practitioners.</p>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/smr.70100","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Investigating the Effectiveness of COSMIC Method for Sizing Chatbots' Requirements: A Comparative Analysis","authors":"Rahma Becha,&nbsp;Asma Sellami,&nbsp;Nadia Bouassida,&nbsp;Ali Idri","doi":"10.1002/smr.70110","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.70110","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In the modern digital era, chatbots have emerged as vital AI-powered systems owing to their usefulness and time savings, increasing companies' interest in developing or integrating these AI systems. Proper evaluation of chatbots requirements plays a critical role in managing their development projects and improving their quality and adoption. Although chatbots can be evaluated using the COSMIC FSM method, previous studies have mainly focused on intuitively evaluating the quality requirements of chatbots, often overlooking standardized assessments. In this paper, we report the results of applying COSMIC—ISO 19761 to chatbot requirements through the BotCFP tool. We selected 41 chatbots from web and mobile stores. The selected chatbots were ranked according to their relative COSMIC sizes and the scores obtained from a quality assessment questionnaire. We compared functional size rankings with functionality score rankings, then examined the relationship between chatbots' functional sizes and average users' ratings, alongside the correlation between mobile chatbot downloads and web chatbot visits. The results showed that 68.7% of the chatbots have similar ranking in both functional size and functionality score. Furthermore, there was no correlation between the functional size of the chatbots and their average users' ratings, mobile downloads, and web visits. The analysis of the results shows the effectiveness of the COSMIC FSM in assessing the chatbot requirements of the application layer. Our investigation highlights the need to extend COSMIC to support in-depth evaluation of chatbots and AI-based systems at the AI layer in future work.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exceptions Can Be Nested: An Exploratory Study on Nested Exceptions in Java Crashes","authors":"Shaoting Liu,&nbsp;Haiyan Xu,&nbsp;Qi Xin,&nbsp;Jifeng Xuan","doi":"10.1002/smr.70099","DOIUrl":"10.1002/smr.70099","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Crash reports can be used to reproduce a crash scenario and to localize a fault. A nested exception report is a type of crash report with two or more exceptions, where one exception is triggered by another. The complexity of nested exception reports has primarily hindered the research progress of fault localization and crash reproduction. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study on nested exceptions in Java programs by answering five research questions for the root cause of nested exceptions, including the data scale of nested exceptions, the concerns on nested exceptions, the correlated factors on concerns, the crash scenario of nested exceptions, and the simplification of nested exceptions. To support our study, we collect a dataset of crash reports with nested exceptions, called JCauseCrash dataset, which contains 1368 nested exception reports from 26 Java projects. Our study mainly shows five empirical results on the root cause of nested exceptions in Java programs. Our findings are listed as follows: (1) From the crash reports under evaluation, there are 1368 nested exception reports in the 26 Java projects, accounting for 30.80% of the crash reports (1368/3437); (2) programmers concern on nested exception reports more than non-nested ones; (3) the number of comments in nested exception reports correlates with the lifecycle of crash reports; (4) a parameterized constructor with an object of <span>Throwable</span> and the use of <span>throw</span> keyword highly correlates with the number of nested exception reports; and (5) without modifying the semantics of source code, programmers can simplify complex nested exception reports by eliminating a parameterized constructor with an object of <span>Throwable</span> class in the line of throwing an exception.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Software-Evolution and Process","volume":"38 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147682912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}