Related papers: Predicting Usefulness of Code Review Comments usin…
Software security vulnerabilities can lead to severe consequences, making early detection essential. Although code review serves as a critical defense mechanism against security flaws, relevant feedback remains scarce due to limited…
Development bots are used on Github to automate repetitive activities. Such bots communicate with human actors via issue comments and pull request comments. Identifying such bot comments allows preventing bias in socio-technical studies…
Existing conversational recommendation (CR) systems usually suffer from insufficient item information when conducted on short dialogue history and unfamiliar items. Incorporating external information (e.g., reviews) is a potential solution…
Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…
Background: Modern Code Review (MCR) is a key component for delivering high-quality software and sharing knowledge among developers. Effective reviews require an in-depth understanding of the code and demand from the reviewers to…
E-commerce dominates a large part of the world's economy with many websites dedicated to online selling products. The vast majority of e-commerce websites provide their customers with the ability to express their opinions about the…
Pre-trained code models have emerged as crucial tools in various code intelligence tasks. However, their effectiveness depends on the quality of the pre-training dataset, particularly the human reference comments, which serve as a bridge…
Perhaps the most widely used form of code documentation is function header comments. We performed a large-scale survey of 367 developers to catalog their expectations from such documentation and to chronicle actual practice. Paradoxically,…
Context: Pre-publication peer review of scientific articles is considered a key element of the research process in software engineering, yet it is often perceived as not to work fully well. Objective: We aim at understanding the perceptions…
Peer assessment is an efficient and effective learning assessment method that has been used widely in diverse fields in higher education. Despite its many benefits, a fundamental problem in peer assessment is that participants lack the…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for writing and review support, but their usefulness depends on context-dependent criteria, such as expert preferences or organization-specific conventions, that are often tacit,…
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…
We formulate the novel task of automatically updating an existing natural language comment based on changes in the body of code it accompanies. We propose an approach that learns to correlate changes across two distinct language…
This paper investigates the quality of source code comments automatically generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). While AI-based comment generation has emerged as a promising solution to reduce developers' documentation effort, prior…
Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…
Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far,…
In the pull-based development model, code contributions are submitted as pull requests (PRs) to undergo reviews and approval by other developers with the goal of being merged into the code base. A PR can be supported by a description, whose…
Developer turnover is inevitable on software projects and leads to knowledge loss, a reduction in productivity, and an increase in defects. Mitigation strategies to deal with turnover tend to disrupt and increase workloads for developers.…
User comments on online programming platforms such as Stack Overflow play a vital role in maintaining the correctness and relevance of shared code examples. However, the majority of comments express gratitude or clarification, while only a…
Listening to user's requirements is crucial to building and maintaining high quality software. Online software user feedback has been shown to contain large amounts of information useful to requirements engineering (RE). Previous studies…