Related papers: Sourcerer's Apprentice and the study of code snipp…

Code review is widely known as one of the best practices for software quality assurance in software development. In a typical code review process, reviewers check the code committed by developers to ensure the quality of the code, during…

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 systems are getting more complex as the system grows where maintaining such system is a primary concern for the industry. Code clone is one of the factors making software maintenance more difficult. It is a process of replicating…

Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in…

In Open Source Software, resources of any project are open for reuse by introducing dependencies or copying the resource itself. In contrast to dependency-based reuse, the infrastructure to systematically support copy-based reuse appears to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in software development tasks nowadays. Unlike reusing code taken from the Web, for LLMs' generated code, developers are concerned about its lack of trustworthiness and possible copyright or…

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.…

As computer systems become more and more complex, software and tools lag more and more behind. This is especially true for scientific software that often demands high performance, and thus needs to take advantage of parallelisms, memory…

Websites are frequently used by programmers to support the development process. This paper investigates programmer-Web interactions when coding, and combines observations of behaviour with assessments of the resulting source code. We report…

Stack Overflow is widely recognized by software practitioners as the go-to resource for addressing technical issues and sharing practical solutions. While not typically seen as a scholarly forum, users on Stack Overflow commonly refer to…

Large language models trained on source code can support a variety of software development tasks, such as code recommendation and program repair. Large amounts of data for training such models benefit the models' performance. However, the…

We study model-agnostic copies of machine learning classifiers. We develop the theory behind the problem of copying, highlighting its differences with that of learning, and propose a framework to copy the functionality of any classifier…

Third-party package usage has become a common practice in contemporary software development. Developers often face different challenges, including choosing the right libraries, installing errors, discrepancies, setting up the environment,…

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,…

Knowledge sharing plays a crucial role throughout all software application development activities. When programmers learn and share through media like Stack overflow, GitHub, Meetups, videos, discussion forums, wikis, and blogs, every…

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, concerns over the unauthorized use of copyrighted and licensed content in their training data have grown, especially in the context of code. Open-source code, often protected by…

With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…

Deep Learning (DL) models to analyze source code have shown immense promise during the past few years. More recently, self-supervised pre-training has gained traction for learning generic code representations valuable for many downstream SE…

Machine Learning software documentation is different from most of the documentations that were studied in software engineering research. Often, the users of these documentations are not software experts. The increasing interest in using…