Skill UI

A comprehensive skill to identify, analyze, prioritize, and track technical debt across large codebases. It provides three interconnected tools: a Debt Scanner, a Debt Prioritizer (using cost-of-delay frameworks), and a Debt Dashboard. This system helps engineering teams make data-driven decisions to balance new features with necessary maintenance and refactoring work, ensuring the long-term sustainability of software systems.

A comprehensive methodology guide for designing and auditing empirical studies in software engineering, specifically focused on maintenance, evolution, and change impact. It outlines best practices for ensuring evidence is proportional to the claim, managing data provenance (SHAs, criteria), handling statistical confounds (survivorship, effect sizes), and integrating rigorous LLM evaluation protocols.

A comprehensive guide for auditing and positioning the novelty and eligibility of research submissions in the field of software maintenance and evolution. It teaches authors to write a 'delta-first' related work section, contrasting their contribution against key prior works and covering specialized literature lanes (e.g., MSR, ICSE, TSE) to demonstrate deep command of the academic community.

This comprehensive guide assists software engineers in determining the most appropriate venue (e.g., ICSME, ICSE, MSR) for their research paper. It clarifies the critical difference between general software engineering techniques and studies focused on the post-release lifecycle, such as maintenance, technical debt, program comprehension, and system evolution.

This guide provides stringent rules and structural advice for authors tackling academic papers, particularly in the domain of software maintenance and evolution. It emphasizes leading with the maintenance problem, stating research questions as contractual measurements, pairing every claim with proportional evidence, and rigorously discussing threats to validity. Use this when revising academic submissions to ensure maximum impact and technical rigor for the field.

This guide assists authors with positioning their computer science manuscripts for the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). It details the core scope, including software maintenance, evolution, refactoring, and technical debt, and provides best practices for structuring submissions. It emphasizes the need for real repository evidence, actionable engineering insights, and proper differentiation from related venues like SANER or ICSE.

This skill addresses the common problem of documentation decay in long-lived software projects. It establishes a canonical governance layer by assigning four non-overlapping roles—Constitution, Map, Status, and History—to existing documentation. By linking these roles to the active agent harness, it prevents documentation drift, ensuring that all project information remains accurate, authoritative, and contextually linked to the current codebase, making it ideal for the maintenance phase.

Apply Michael Feathers-inspired rules to safely modify hard-to-test legacy code using characterization tests, seams, sprout methods, or wrap methods. Ideal for risky changes, missing tests, dependency breaking, and incremental risk reduction in software maintenance.