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Pointers are a powerful, but dangerous feature provided by the C and C++ programming languages, and incorrect use of pointers is a common source of bugs and security vulnerabilities. Making secure software is crucial, as vulnerabilities…

Complex software can be hard to read, adapt, and maintain. Refactoring it can create cleaner and self-explanatory code. Refactoring tools try to guide developers towards better code, with more quality. However, most of them take too long to…

Scientific software is essential to scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Abandoned (or unmaintained), buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software can…

Software services play a crucial role in daily life, with automated actions determining access to resources and information. Trusting service providers to perform these actions fairly and accurately is essential, yet challenging for users…

Most existing pre-trained language models for source code focus on learning the static code text, typically augmented with static code structures (abstract syntax tree, dependency graphs, etc.). However, program semantics will not be fully…

Open source software development, particularly within institutions such as universities and research laboratories, is often decentralized and difficult to track. Although academic teams produce many impactful scientific tools, their…

Reading computer program code and documentation written by others is, we are told, one of the best ways to learn the art of writing intelligible and maintainable code and documentation. The software resurrection exercise, introduced in this…

Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…

Analysis pipelines commonly use high-level technologies that are popular when created, but are unlikely to be readable, executable, or sustainable in the long term. A set of criteria is introduced to address this problem: Completeness (no…

Software engineers have a wide variety of tools and techniques that can help them improve the quality of their code, but still, a lot of bugs remain undetected. In this paper we build on the idea that if a particular fragment of code is…

The recent progress of artificial intelligence(AI) has shown great potentials for alleviating human burden in various complex tasks. From the view of software engineering, AI techniques can be seen in many fundamental aspects of…

Maintenance is a critical stage in the software lifecycle, ensuring that post-release systems remain reliable, efficient, and adaptable. However, manual software maintenance is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone, which…

Code review is a critical step in the software development life cycle, which assesses and boosts the code's effectiveness and correctness, pinpoints security issues, and raises its quality by adhering to best practices. Due to the increased…

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) fuels our global digital infrastructure but is commonly maintained by small groups of people whose time and labor represent a depletable resource. For the OSS projects to stay sustainable, i.e., viable…

Software is becoming a critical component of most products and organizational functions. The ability to continuously improve software determines how well the organization can respond to market opportunities. Continuous software engineering…

A resource leak occurs when a program fails to free some finite resource after it is no longer needed. Such leaks are a significant cause of real-world crashes and performance problems. Recent work proposed an approach to prevent resource…

Traditional algorithms for detecting differences in source code focus on differences between lines. As such, little can be learned about abstract changes that occur over time within a project. Structural differencing on the program's…

The current practices of software industry demands development of a software within time and budget which is highly productive. The traditional approach of developing a software from scratch requires considerable amount of effort. To…

While there has been substantial empirical work identifying factors that influence the contribution to, and use of open source software, we have as yet little theory that identifies the key constructs and relationships that would allow us…

CHR is a very versatile programming language that allows programmers to declaratively specify constraint solvers. An important part of the development of such solvers is in their testing and debugging phases. Current CHR implementations…