Related papers: Mutation Testing as a Safety Net for Test Code Ref…

Modular and well-written software is an ideal that programmers strive to achieve. However, real-world project constraints limit the amount of reusable and modular code that programmers can produce. Many techniques exist that refactor code…

Test functions are important to validate new optimization algorithms and to compare the performance of various algorithms. There are many test functions in the literature, but there is no standard list or set of test functions one has to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate plausible test code. Intuitively they generate this by imitating tests seen in their training data, rather than reasoning about execution semantics. However, such reasoning is important when…

Tool-assisted refactoring transformations must be trustworthy if programmers are to be confident in applying them on arbitrarily extensive and complex code in order to improve style or efficiency. We propose a simple, high-level but…

During the software lifecycle, a program can evolve several times for different reasons such as the optimisation of a bottle-neck, the refactoring of an obscure function, etc. These code changes often involve several functions or modules,…

Code refactoring is a fundamental software engineering practice aimed at improving code quality and maintainability. Despite its importance, developers often neglect refactoring due to the significant time, effort, and resources it…

Large language models and deep learning models designed for code intelligence have revolutionized the software engineering field due to their ability to perform various code-related tasks. These models can process source code and software…

Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the…

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…

Automated tests play an important role in software evolution because they can rapidly detect faults introduced during changes. In practice, code-coverage metrics are often used as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites with…

Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance, and is usually performed to enforce better design and coding practices, while coping with design defects. The Extract Method refactoring is widely used for merging duplicate code…

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…

Refactoring is an important activity that is frequently performed in software development, and among them, Extract Method is known to be one of the most frequently performed refactorings. The existing techniques for recommending Extract…

Testing is one of the most indispensable tasks in software engineering. The role of testing in software development has grown significantly because testing is able to reveal defects in the code in an early stage of development. Many unit…

Mutation analysis is one of the most effective, but costly means of assessing the ability of software test suites to prevent bugs. Traditional mutation analysis involves producing and evaluating syntactic variants of the original to check…

Context: Modern code review is a widely employed technique in both industrial and open-source projects, serving to enhance software quality, share knowledge, and ensure compliance with coding standards and guidelines. While code review is…

Background: Test-driven development (TDD) is a technique that repeats short coding cycles interleaved with testing. The developer first writes a unit test for the desired functionality, followed by the necessary production code, and…

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…

Developers often refactor source code to improve its quality during software development. A challenge in refactoring is to determine if it can be applied or not. To help with this decision-making process, we aim to search for past…

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…