Related papers: Less is More: Minimizing Code Reorganization using…

Code reuse is a widespread practice across software development projects, suggesting an inherent trust in the reused code. Yet, there is a lack of a fundamental understanding of developers' trust and how various factors mold their…

Refactoring is the practice of improving software quality without altering its external behavior. Developers intuitively refactor their code for multiple purposes, such as improving program comprehension, reducing code complexity, dealing…

Automating the decision of whether a code change requires manual review is vital for maintaining software quality in modern development workflows. However, the emergence of new programming languages and frameworks creates a critical…

Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code by changing its internal structure without affecting its external behaviour, with the main aims of improving the quality of software product. Therefore, there is a belief…

Context: Due to the association of significant efforts, even a minor improvement in the effectiveness of Code Reviews(CR) can incur significant savings for a software development organization. Aim: This study aims to develop a finer grain…

Code changes constitute one of the most important features of software evolution. Studying them can provide insights into the nature of software development and also lead to practical solutions - recommendations and automations of popular…

Code smells indicate the potential problems of software quality so that developers can identify refactoring opportunities by detecting code smells. State-of-the-art approaches leverage heuristics, machine learning, and deep learning to…

Potential benefits such as agile service delivery have led many companies to deliver their business capabilities through microservices. Bad smells are however always around the corner, as witnessed by the considerable body of literature…

In this paper, we focus on studying duplicate logging statements, which are logging statements that have the same static text message. We manually studied over 4K duplicate logging statements and their surrounding code in five large-scale…

LLM-based code assistants are becoming increasingly popular among developers. These tools help developers improve their coding efficiency and reduce errors by providing real-time suggestions based on the developer's codebase. While…

Background. Containerization technologies are widely adopted in the DevOps workflow. The most commonly used one is Docker, which requires developers to define a specification file (Dockerfile) to build the image used for creating…

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…

Nearly all modern software suffers from bloat that negatively impacts its performance and security. To combat this problem, several automated techniques have been proposed to debloat software. A key metric used in many of these works to…

Modern software development teams are distributed across onsite and off-shore locations. Each team has developers with varying experience levels and English communication skills. In such a diverse development environment it is important to…

This study addresses the challenge of detecting code smells in large-scale software systems using machine learning (ML). Traditional detection methods often suffer from low accuracy and poor generalization across different datasets. To…

Spreadsheets are the most popular end-user programming software, where formulae act like programs and also have smells. One well recognized common smell of spreadsheet formulae is nest-IF expressions, which have low readability and high…

Nowadays, we are witnessing an increasing adoption of Deep Learning (DL) based software systems in many industries. Designing a DL program requires constructing a deep neural network (DNN) and then training it on a dataset. This process…

Code often suffers from performance bugs. These bugs necessitate the research and practice of code optimization. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually designing and maintaining rules for specific performance bugs (e.g., redundant…

Bug localization is an important aspect of software maintenance because it can locate modules that should be changed to fix a specific bug. Our previous study showed that the accuracy of the information retrieval (IR)-based bug localization…

Code review is a critical practice in modern software engineering, helping developers detect defects early, improve code quality, and facilitate knowledge sharing. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), a growing body…