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Although peer code review is widely adopted in both commercial and open source development, existing studies suggest that such code reviews often contain a significant amount of non-useful review comments. Unfortunately, to date, no tools…

Although software managers are generally good at new project estimation, their experience of scheduling rework tends to be poor. Inconsistent or incorrect effort estimation can increase the risk that the completion time for a project will…

Organizations that develop software have recognized that software process models are particularly useful for maintaining a high standard of quality. In the last decade, simulations of software processes were used in several settings and…

Programs are a kind of communication to both computers and people, hence as students are trained to write programs they need to learn to write well-designed, readable code rather than code that simply functions correctly. The difficulty in…

Reviewing source code is a common practice in a modern and collaborative coding environment. In the past few years, the research on modern code reviews has gained interest among practitioners and researchers. The objective of our…

Measuring performance & quantifying a performance change are core evaluation techniques in programming language and systems research. Of 122 recent scientific papers, as many as 65 included experimental evaluation that quantified a…

Peer review is a key activity intended to preserve the quality and integrity of scientific publications. However, in practice it is far from perfect. We aim at understanding how reviewers, including those who have won awards for reviewing,…

One of the fundamental steps toward understanding a complex system is identifying variation at the scale of the system's components that is most relevant to behavior on a macroscopic scale. Mutual information provides a natural means of…

Code Smell, similar to a bad smell, is a surface indication of something tainted but in terms of software writing practices. This metric is an indication of a deeper problem lies within the code and is associated with an issue which is…

Just because software developers say they believe in "X", that does not necessarily mean that "X" is true. As shown here, there exist numerous beliefs listed in the recent Software Engineering literature which are only supported by small…

Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…

For several years, the completion time and the decoding delay problems in Instantly Decodable Network Coding (IDNC) were considered separately and were thought to completely act against each other. Recently, some works aimed to balance the…

Researchers usually discretize a continuous dependent variable into two target classes by introducing an artificial discretization threshold (e.g., median). However, such discretization may introduce noise (i.e., discretization noise) due…

It is natural to suppose that a Large Language Model is more likely to generate correct test cases when prompted with correct code under test, compared to incorrect code under test. However, the size of this effect has never been previously…

Software is constantly changing, requiring developers to perform several derived tasks in a timely manner, such as writing a description for the intention of the code change, or identifying the defect-prone code changes. Considering that…

Refactoring is a maintenance activity that aims to improve design quality while preserving the behavior of a system. Several (semi)automated approaches have been proposed to support developers in this maintenance activity, based on the…

Code review is essential for maintaining software quality but often time-consuming and cognitively demanding, especially in industrial environments. Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have opened new avenues for automating core…

Code cloning is an important software engineering aspect. It is a common software reuse principle that consists of duplicating source code within a program or across different systems owned or maintained by the same entity. There are…

We investigate how code obfuscation influences human understanding of programs through an output-prediction task. To study this effect, we construct multiple levels of obfuscation, ranging from unobfuscated code to transformations involving…

Code search engine is an essential tool in software development. Many code search methods have sprung up, focusing on the overall ranking performance of code search. In this paper, we study code search from another perspective by analyzing…