Related papers: How Scale Affects Structure in Java Programs

Several genetic programming systems are created, each solving a different problem. In these systems, the median number of generations G needed to evolve a working program is measured. The behavior of G is observed as the difficulty of the…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

The migration process between different third-party software libraries is hard, complex and error-prone. Typically, during a library migration process, developers opt to replace methods from the retired library with other methods from a new…

The capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate, debug, and explain code has sparked the interest of researchers and educators in undergraduate programming, with many anticipating their transformative potential in programming…

Test flakiness is a problem that affects testing and processes that rely on it. Several factors cause or influence the flakiness of test outcomes. Test execution order, randomness and concurrency are some of the more common and well-studied…

An eye-tracking study of 18 developers reading and summarizing Java methods is presented. The developers provide a written summary for methods assigned to them. In total, 63 methods are used from five different systems. Previous studies on…

Real software, the kind working programmers produce by the kLOC to solve real-world problems, tends to be "natural", like speech or natural language; it tends to be highly repetitive and predictable. Researchers have captured this…

Code large language models (Code LLMs) are powerful but costly to train, with scaling laws predicting performance from model size, data, and compute. However, different programming languages (PLs) have varying impacts during pre-training…

Backward slicing has been used extensively in program understanding, debugging and scaling up of program analysis. For large programs, the size of the conventional backward slice is about 25% of the program size. This may be too large to be…

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…

Now we live in an era of big data, and big data applications are becoming more and more pervasive. How to benchmark data center computer systems running big data applications (in short big data systems) is a hot topic. In this paper, we…

Source code is rarely written in isolation. It depends significantly on the programmatic context, such as the class that the code would reside in. To study this phenomenon, we introduce the task of generating class member functions given…

Source Code Summarization is the task of writing short, natural language descriptions of source code. The main use for these descriptions is in software documentation e.g. the one-sentence Java method descriptions in JavaDocs. Code…

In this paper, we present our work towards comparing on-line and off-line evaluation metrics in the context of small e-commerce recommender systems. Recommending on small e-commerce enterprises is rather challenging due to the lower volume…

Existing software tools enable characterizing and measuring the amount of technical debt at selective granularity levels. In this paper we aim to study the evolution and characteristics of technical debt in open-source software. We carry…

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are distinguished by their architecture, which dictates their parameter size and performance capabilities. Social scientists have increasingly adopted LLMs for text classification tasks, which are difficult to…

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has changed software development, with tools like Copilot, JetBrains AI Assistant, and others boosting developers' productivity. However, developers now spend more time reviewing code than…

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…

Large Language models (LLMs) are finding wide use in software engineering practice. These models are extremely data-hungry, and are largely trained on open-source (OSS) code distributed with permissive licenses. In terms of actual use…