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Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology…
Background: Open source software has an increasing importance in modern software development. However, there is also a growing concern on the sustainability of such projects, which are usually managed by a small number of developers,…
Due to the difficulties in replicating and scaling up qualitative studies, such studies are rarely verified. Accordingly, in this paper, we leverage the advantages of crowdsourcing (low costs, fast speed, scalable workforce) to replicate…
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.…
Detecting the presence of bots in distributed software development activity is very important in order to prevent bias in large-scale socio-technical empirical analyses. In previous work, we proposed a classification model to detect bots in…
The pull-based development process has become prevalent on platforms such as GitHub as a form of distributed software development. Potential contributors can create and submit a set of changes to a software project through pull requests.…
Context: Learning-based automatic program repair techniques are showing promise to provide quality fix suggestions for detected bugs in the source code of the software. These tools mostly exploit historical data of buggy and fixed code…
Developers collaboratively discuss, implement, use, and share software entities hosted on software repositories. Proper documentation plays an important role in successful software management and maintenance. Users exploit Issue Tracking…
Recently, automatic code comment generation is proposed to facilitate program comprehension. Existing code comment generation techniques focus on describing the functionality of the source code. However, there are other aspects such as…
The most popular code review tools (e.g., Gerrit and GitHub) present the files to review sorted in alphabetical order. Could this choice or, more generally, the relative position in which a file is presented bias the outcome of code…
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…
Empirical research on code review processes is increasingly central to understanding software quality and collaboration. However, collecting and analyzing review data remains a time-consuming and technically intensive task. Most researchers…
Pull Requests (PRs) are a mechanism on modern collaborative coding platforms, such as GitHub. PRs allow developers to tell others that their code changes are available for merging into another branch in a repository. A PR needs to be…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained prominence in the field of software development, significantly boosting productivity and simplifying teamwork. Although prior studies have examined task-specific applications, the…
Background: Pull-based development has shaped the practice of Modern Code Review (MCR), in which reviewers can contribute code improvements, such as refactorings, through comments and commits in Pull Requests (PRs). Past MCR studies…
Autonomous coding agents are reshaping software development by creating pull requests (PRs) on GitHub, referred to as agentic PRs. In parallel, the review process is also becoming autonomous, thereby making reviewer bots key actors in the…
Code review is a well-established and valued practice in the software engineering community contributing to both code quality and interpersonal benefits. However, there are challenges in both tools and processes that give rise to…
Code reviews are central for software quality assurance. Ideally, reviewers should explain their feedback to enable authors of code changes to understand the feedback and act accordingly. Different developers might need different…
Peer code review has been found to be effective in identifying security vulnerabilities. However, despite practicing mandatory code reviews, many Open Source Software (OSS) projects still encounter a large number of post-release security…
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,…