Related papers: The effects of change decomposition on code review…

Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase,…

Code review is a widespread practice to improve software quality and transfer knowledge. It is often seen as time-consuming due to the need for manual effort and potential delays. Several AI-assisted tools, such as Qodo, GitHub Copilot, and…

The automation of code review has been tackled by several researchers with the goal of reducing its cost. The adoption of deep learning in software engineering pushed the automation to new boundaries, with techniques imitating developers in…

Peer code review and continuous integration often interleave with each other in the modern software quality management. Although several studies investigate how non-technical factors (e.g., reviewer workload), developer participation and…

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

Training a deep learning model on source code has gained significant traction recently. Since such models reason about vectors of numbers, source code needs to be converted to a code representation before vectorization. Numerous approaches…

Cognitive-Driven Development (CDD) is a coding design technique that aims to reduce the cognitive effort that developers place in understanding a given code unit (e.g., a class). By following CDD design practices, it is expected that the…

A source code difference (diff) indicates changes made by comparing new and old source codes, and it can be utilized in code reviews to help developers understand the changes made to the code. Although many diff generation methods have been…

Context: Code review has long been a core practice in collaborative software engineering. As automation becomes increasingly embedded in development workflows, the role and functioning of code review are subject to change. Objective: This…

Code review is a fundamental process in software development that plays a pivotal role in ensuring code quality and reducing the likelihood of errors and bugs. However, code review can be complex, subjective, and time-consuming. Quality…

The continuous evolution of software projects necessitates the implementation of changes to enhance performance and reduce defects. This research explores effective strategies for learning and implementing useful changes in software…

Visual programming, a modular and generalizable paradigm, integrates different modules and Python operators to solve various vision-language tasks. Unlike end-to-end models that need task-specific data, it advances in performing visual…

GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…

Context: Changing a software application with many build-time configuration settings may introduce unexpected side-effects. For example, a change intended to be specific to a platform (e.g., Windows) or product configuration (e.g.,…

Recent research provides evidence that effective communication in collaborative software development has significant impact on the software development lifecycle. Although related qualitative and quantitative studies point out textual…

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Computer programs often behave differently under different compilers or in different computing environments. Relative debugging is a collection of techniques by which these differences are analysed. Differences may arise because of…

Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…

We need ways to improve the code quality. Programmers have different level of tenure and experience. Standard and programming languages change and we are forced to re-use legacy code with minimum revision. Programmers develop their habits…