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On the worldwide web, not only are webpages connected but source code is too. Software development is becoming more accessible to everyone and the licensing for software remains complicated. We need to know if software licenses are being…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-02 Stephen Romansky , Cheng Chen , Baljeet Malhotra , Abram Hindle

StackOverflow (SO) is a widely used question-and-answer (Q\&A) website for software developers and computer scientists. GitHub is an online development platform used for storing, tracking, and collaborating on software projects. Prior work…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Juntong Chen , Yan Zhao , Na Meng

Software developers often look for solutions to their code-level problems using the Stack Overflow Q&A website. To receive help, developers frequently submit questions containing sample code segments and the description of the programming…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Saikat Mondal , Mohammad Masudur Rahman , Chanchal K. Roy , Kevin Schneider

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers to seek programming-related information. More and more developers use Community Question and Answer forums, such as Stack Overflow, to search for code examples of how to accomplish…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Zhipeng Gao , Xin Xia , David Lo , John Grundy , Xindong Zhang , Zhenchang Xing

Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Kathrin Figl , Maria Kirchner , Sebastian Baltes , Michael Felderer

Code comments are the primary means to document implementation and facilitate program comprehension. Thus, their quality should be a primary concern to improve program maintenance. While much effort has been dedicated to detecting bad…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-26 Arianna Blasi , Nataliia Stulova , Alessandra Gorla , Oscar Nierstrasz

Code review is a mature practice for software quality assurance in software development with which reviewers check the code that has been committed by developers, and verify the quality of code. During the code review discussions, reviewers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Liming Fu , Peng Liang , Beiqi Zhang

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Elmar Juergens , Florian Deissenboeck , Benjamin Hummel , Stefan Wagner

Background: Code cloning - copying and reusing pieces of source code - is a common phenomenon in software development in practice. There have been several empirical studies on the effects of cloning, but there are contradictory results…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-11-28 Stefan Wagner , Asim Abdulkhaleq , Kamer Kaya , Alexander Paar

An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-09-13 Balwinder Sodhi , Shipra Sharma

Background: Sub-optimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers may write low-quality code due to many reasons, such as lack of technical knowledge, lack of experience, time pressure, management decisions, and even unhappiness.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul , Matheus Paixao

We study the impact of Stack Overflow code evolution on the stability of prior research findings derived from Stack Overflow data and provide recommendations for future studies. We systematically reviewed papers published between 2005--2023…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Alfusainey Jallow , Sven Bugiel

Smart contract developers frequently seek solutions to developmental challenges on Q&A platforms such as Stack Overflow (SO). Although community responses often provide viable solutions, the embedded code snippets can also contain hidden…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Jiachi Chen , Chong Chen , Jiang Hu , John Grundy , Yanlin Wang , Ting Chen , Zibin Zheng

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers as a popular way to seek programming-related information from peers via the internet. The Stack Overflow community recommends users to provide the related code snippet when they…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhipeng Gao , Xin Xia , John Grundy , David Lo , Yuan-Fang Li

Does the training of large language models potentially infringe upon code licenses? Furthermore, are there any datasets available that can be safely used for training these models without violating such licenses? In our study, we assess the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Jonathan Katzy , Răzvan-Mihai Popescu , Arie van Deursen , Maliheh Izadi

Software developers often reuse code from online sources such as Stack Overflow within their projects. However, the process of searching for code snippets and integrating them within existing source code can be tedious. In order to improve…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Brittany Reid , Christoph Treude , Markus Wagner

Code clones are code snippets that are identical or similar to other snippets within the same or different files. They are often created through copy-and-paste practices and modified during development and maintenance activities. Since a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Reishi Yokomori , Katsuro Inoue

Reusing code can produce duplicate or near-duplicate code clones in code repositories. Current code clone detection techniques, like Program Dependence Graphs, rely on code structure and their dependencies to detect clones. These techniques…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Sandeep Kaur Kuttal , Akash Ghosh

One problem when studying how to find and fix syntax errors is how to get natural and representative examples of syntax errors. Most syntax error datasets are not free, open, and public, or they are extracted from novice programmers and do…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-07-19 Alexander William Wong , Amir Salimi , Shaiful Chowdhury , Abram Hindle

Software developers often look for solutions to their code-level problems by submitting questions to technical Q&A websites like Stack Overflow (SO). They usually include example code segments with questions to describe the programming…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Saikat Mondal , Banani Roy