Related papers: Recording Concerns in Source Code Using Annotation…
Software developers experience and share a wide range of emotions throughout a rich ecosystem of communication channels. A recent trend that has emerged in empirical software engineering studies is leveraging sentiment analysis of…
Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…
Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…
Researches have shown that most effort of today's software development is maintenance and evolution. Developers often use integrated development environments, debuggers, and tools for code search, testing, and program understanding to…
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…
Annotation is a central mechanism in visualization design that enables people to communicate key insights. Prior research has provided essential accounts of the visual forms annotations take, but less attention has been paid to the…
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,…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
Code comments are essential for clarifying code functionality, improving readability, and facilitating collaboration among developers. Despite their importance, comments often become outdated, leading to inconsistencies with the…
Annotation guidelines used to guide the annotation of training and evaluation datasets can have a considerable impact on the quality of machine learning models. In this study, we explore the effects of annotation guidelines on the quality…
The availability of large-scale datasets, advanced architectures, and powerful computational resources have led to effective code models that automate diverse software engineering activities. The datasets usually consist of billions of…
Statically-annotated types have been shown to aid developers in a number of programming tasks, and this benefit holds true even when static type checking is not used. It is hypothesized that this is because developers use type annotations…
Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…
As the size of the datasets getting larger, accurately annotating such datasets is becoming more impractical due to the expensiveness on both time and economy. Therefore, crowd-sourcing has been widely adopted to alleviate the cost of…
Field data is an invaluable source of information for testers and developers because it witnesses how software systems operate in real environments, capturing scenarios and configurations relevant to end-users. Unfortunately, collecting…
Context: In the realm of software development, maintaining high software quality is a persistent challenge. However, this challenge is often impeded by the lack of comprehensive understanding of how specific code modifications influence…
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…
Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of…
Background: Developers spend a lot of their time on understanding source code. Static code analysis tools can draw attention to code that is difficult for developers to understand. However, most of the findings are based on non-validated…
Abridged: Programmer attention represents the visual focus of programmers on parts of the source code in pursuit of programming tasks. We conducted an in-depth human study with 10 Java programmers, where each programmer generated summaries…