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Due to the growing complexity of software systems, there has been a dramatic increase and industry demand for tools and techniques on software refactoring in the last ten years, defined traditionally as a set of program transformations…
Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…
Detecting semantic interference remains a challenge in collaborative software development. Recent lightweight static analysis techniques improve efficiency over SDG-based methods, but they still suffer from a high rate of false positives. A…
The concept of Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR) was introduced to explore how developers document their refactoring activities in commit messages, i.e., developers' explicit documentation of refactoring operations intentionally introduced…
Spreadsheet technology is a cornerstone of IT systems in most organisations. It is often the glue that binds more structured transaction-based systems together. Financial operations are a case in point where spreadsheets fill the gaps left…
Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While several studies propose refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how…
Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) enable software developers and managers to collect and resolve issues collaboratively. While researchers have extensively analysed ITS data to automate or assist specific activities such as issue assignments,…
In this paper we present a simple re-ranking method for Automatic Sentence Simplification based on the noisy channel scheme. Instead of directly computing the best simplification given a complex text, the re-ranking method also considers…
The primary value of AI agents in software development lies in their ability to extend the developer's capacity for reasoning and action, not to supplant human involvement. To showcase how to use agents working in tandem with developers, we…
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…
All users of spreadsheets struggle with the problem of errors. Errors are thought to be prevalent in spreadsheets, and in some instances they have cost organizations millions of dollars. In a previous study of 50 operational spreadsheets we…
Recently, generative AIs like ChatGPT have become available to the wide public. These tools can for instance be used by students to generate essays or whole theses. But how does a teacher know whether a text is written by a student or an…
The Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in code-related tasks. However, most research focuses on improving the output quality of LLMs (e.g., correctness), and less attention has been paid to the LLM input (e.g.,…
In this paper, a new approach is proposed for automated software maintenance. The tool is able to perform 26 different refactorings. It also contains a large selection of metrics to measure the impact of the refactorings on the software and…
Spreadsheets offer a supremely successful democratisation platform, placing the manipulation and presentation of numbers within the grasp of users that have little or no mathematical expertise or IT experience. What appears to be almost…
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…
Detecting salient parts in text using natural language processing has been widely used to mitigate the effects of information overflow. Nevertheless, most of the datasets available for this task are derived mainly from academic…
Spreadsheets are widely used for table manipulation and presentation. Stylistic formatting of these tables is an important property for both presentation and analysis. As a result, popular spreadsheet software, such as Excel, supports…
The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, wildlife preservation, autonomous driving and criminal justice system calls for a data-centric approach to AI. Data scientists spend the majority of…
The hard coding of input data or constants into spreadsheet formulas is widely recognised as poor spreadsheet model design. However, the importance of avoiding such practice appears to be underestimated perhaps in light of the lack of…