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Researchers in empirical software engineering often make claims based on observable data such as defect reports. Unfortunately, in many cases, these claims are generalized beyond the data sets that have been evaluated. Will the researcher's…
In code comprehension experiments, participants are usually told at the beginning what kind of code comprehension task to expect. Describing experiment scenarios and experimental tasks will influence participants in ways that are sometimes…
Recently, high-performing code generation systems based on large language models have surfaced. They are trained on massive corpora containing much more natural text than actual executable computer code. This work shows that current code…
Multi-hop Question Answering (QA) is a challenging task since it requires an accurate aggregation of information from multiple context paragraphs and a thorough understanding of the underlying reasoning chains. Recent work in multi-hop QA…
Multi-LLM revision pipelines, in which a second model reviews and improves a draft produced by a first, are widely assumed to derive their gains from genuine error correction. We question this assumption with a controlled decomposition…
Effective software testing is critical for producing reliable and secure software, yet many computer science students struggle to master the foundational concepts required to construct comprehensive test suites. While automated feedback…
Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…
This paper studies the problem of predicting the coding effort for a subsequent year of development by analysing metrics extracted from project repositories, with an emphasis on projects containing XML code. The study considers thirteen…
Code comments are essential for clarifying code functionality, improving readability, and facilitating collaboration among developers. Despite their importance, comments often become outdated, leading to inconsistencies with the…
Software systems are getting more complex as the system grows where maintaining such system is a primary concern for the industry. Code clone is one of the factors making software maintenance more difficult. It is a process of replicating…
In software reverse engineering, decompilation is the process of recovering source code from binary files. Decompilers are used when it is necessary to understand or analyze software for which the source code is not available. Although…
Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…
Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query.…
Bug finding tools can find defects in software source code us- ing an automated static analysis. This automation may be able to reduce the time spent for other testing and review activities. For this we need to have a clear understanding of…
Context: Over the past decade Software Engineering research has seen a steady increase in survey-based studies, and there are several guidelines providing support for those willing to carry out surveys. The need for auditing survey research…
To avoid software vulnerabilities, organizations are shifting security to earlier stages of the software development, such as at code review time. In this paper, we aim to understand the developers' perspective on assessing software…
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…
Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both…
A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…
Debugging is a central yet complex activity in software engineering. Prior studies have documented debugging strategies and tool usage, but little theory explains how experienced developers reason about bugs in large, real-world codebases.…