Related papers: On the Detection of High-Impact Refactoring Opport…
Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…
Background: Test flakiness is identified as a major issue that compromises the regression testing process of complex software systems. Flaky tests manifest non-deterministic behaviour, send confusing signals to developers, and break their…
Block-based programming languages like Scratch have become increasingly popular as introductory languages for novices. These languages are intended to be used with a "tinkering" approach which allows learners and teachers to quickly…
Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…
Referring to solution programs written by other users is helpful for learners in programming education. However, current online judge systems just list all solution programs submitted by users for references, and the programs are sorted…
Modern programming languages (e.g., Java and C#) provide features to separate error-handling code from regular code, seeking to enhance software comprehensibility and maintainability. Nevertheless, the way exception handling (EH) code is…
Almost every software system provides configuration options to tailor the system to the target platform and application scenario. Often, this configurability renders the analysis of every individual system configuration infeasible. To…
Software vulnerabilities pose significant risks to computer systems, impacting our daily lives, productivity, and even our health. Identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities in a timely manner is crucial to prevent hacking and data…
We study the problem of high-dimensional regression when there may be interacting variables. Approaches using sparsity-inducing penalty functions such as the Lasso can be useful for producing interpretable models. However, when the number…
Selecting the right compiler optimisations has a severe impact on programs' performance. Still, the available optimisations keep increasing, and their effect depends on the specific program, making the task human intractable. Researchers…
Software remodularization through clustering is a common practice to improve internal software quality. However, the true benefit of software clustering is only realized if developers follow through with the recommended refactoring…
RESTful APIs based on HTTP are one of the most important ways to make data and functionality available to applications and software services. However, the quality of the API design strongly impacts API understandability and usability, and…
We aim to explore how developers document their refactoring activities during the software life cycle. We call such activity Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR), which indicates developers' documentation of their refactoring activities. SAR is…
The identification and ranking of impacted files within software reposi-tories is a key challenge in change impact analysis. Existing deterministic approaches that combine heuristic signals, semantic similarity measures, and graph-based…
The most natural method for evaluating program repair systems is to run them on bug datasets, such as Defects4J. Yet, using this evaluation technique on arbitrary real-world programs requires heavy configuration. In this paper, we propose a…
Automated program repair is a crucial task for improving the efficiency of software developers. Recently, neural-based techniques have demonstrated significant promise in generating correct patches for buggy code snippets. However, most…
In this paper, we first collect and track a large number of fixed and unfixed violations across revisions of software. The empirical analyses reveal that there are discrepancies in the distributions of violations that are detected and those…
Compilers can specialize programs having invariants for performance improvement. Detecting program invariants that span large and complex code, however, is difficult for compilers. Traditional compilers do not perform very expensive…
Context: Conducting experiments is central to research machine learning research to benchmark, evaluate and compare learning algorithms. Consequently it is important we conduct reliable, trustworthy experiments. Objective: We investigate…
Each year, thousands of software vulnerabilities are discovered and reported to the public. Unpatched known vulnerabilities are a significant security risk. It is imperative that software vendors quickly provide patches once vulnerabilities…