Related papers: Toxic Code Snippets on Stack Overflow

In software engineering-related tasks (such as programming language tag prediction based on code snippets from Stack Overflow), the programming language classification for code snippets is a common task. In this study, we propose a novel…

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the…

Software developers frequently issue generic natural language queries for code search while using code search engines (e.g., GitHub native search, Krugle). Such queries often do not lead to any relevant results due to vocabulary mismatch…

We approach the important challenge of code autocompletion as an open-domain task, in which a sequence-to-sequence code generator model is enhanced with the ability to attend to reference code snippets supplied by a semantic code search…

AI assistants can help developers by recommending code to be included in their implementations (e.g., suggesting the implementation of a method from its signature). Although useful, these recommendations may mirror copyleft code available…

Code clones, referring to identical or similar code fragments, have long posed challenges in classical programming, impacting software quality, maintainability, and scalability. However, their presence and characteristics in quantum…

Code reuse is common in modern software development, but it can also spread vulnerabilities when developers unknowingly copy risky code. The code fragments that preserve the logic of known vulnerabilities are known as vulnerable code clones…

Software source code often harbours "hotspots": small portions of the code that change far more often than the rest of the project and thus concentrate maintenance activity. We mine the complete version histories of 91 evolving, actively…

Stack Overflow (SO) has been a great source of natural language questions and their code solutions (i.e., question-code pairs), which are critical for many tasks including code retrieval and annotation. In most existing research,…

Version control systems for source code, such as Git, are key tools in modern software development environments. Many developers use online services, such as GitHub or GitLab, for collaborative software development. While software projects…

Exploit proof-of-concepts (PoCs) for known vulnerabilities are widely shared in the security community. They help security analysts to learn from each other and they facilitate security assessments and red teaming tasks. In the recent…

The field of big code relies on mining large corpora of code to perform some learning task. A significant threat to this approach has been recently identified by Lopes et al. (2017) who found a large amount of near-duplicate code on GitHub.…

Secure by Design has become the mainstream development approach ensuring that software systems are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. Architectural security controls need to be carefully monitored over the software development life cycle to…

Copy & paste is a widespread practice when developing software and, thus, duplicated and subsequently modified code occurs frequently in software projects. Since such code clones, i.e., identical or similar fragments of code, can bloat…

Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as the connection between places and physical objects (i.e., things) over the internet/network via smart computing devices. We observed that IoT software developers share solutions to programming…

In software development and maintenance, code comments can help developers understand source code, and improve communication among developers. However, developers sometimes neglect to update the corresponding comment when changing the code,…

Encountering outdated documentation is not a rare occurrence for developers and users in the software engineering community. To ensure that software documentation is up-to-date, developers often have to manually check whether the…

The application of code clone technology accelerates code search, improves code reuse efficiency, and assists in software quality assessment and code vulnerability detection. However, the application of code clones also introduces software…

Software libraries are central to the functionality, security, and maintainability of modern code. As developers increasingly turn to Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist with programming tasks, understanding how these models recommend…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…