Related papers: 9.6 Million Links in Source Code Comments: Purpose…

Research has shown that most resources shared in articles (e.g., URLs to code or data) are not kept up to date and mostly disappear from the web after some years (Zeng et al., 2019). Little is known about the factors that differentiate and…

(Source) code search is widely concerned by software engineering researchers because it can improve the productivity and quality of software development. Given a functionality requirement usually described in a natural language sentence, a…

Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query.…

In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…

Information presented in Wikipedia articles must be attributable to reliable published sources in the form of references. This study examines over 5 million Wikipedia articles to assess the reliability of references in multiple language…

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 development projects involve the use of a wide range of tools to produce a software artifact. Software repositories such as source control systems have become a focus for emergent research because they are a source of rich…

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…

In recent years, funding agencies and journals increasingly advocate for open science practices (e.g. data and method sharing) to improve the transparency, access, and reproducibility of science. However, quantifying these practices at…

As reproducibility becomes a greater concern, conferences have largely converged to a strategy of asking reviewers to indicate whether code was attached to a submission. This is part of a larger trend of taking action based on assumed…

For teams using distributed version control systems, the right collaborative development workflows can help maintaining the long-term quality of project repositories and improving work efficiency. Despite the fact that the workflows are…

A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…

Source code written in textual programming languages is typically edited in integrated development environments or specialized code editors. These tools often display various visual items, such as icons, color highlights or more advanced…

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…

Context: Modern software systems (e.g., Apache Spark) are usually written in multiple programming languages (PLs). There is little understanding on the phenomenon of multi-programming-language commits (MPLCs), which involve modified source…

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.…

The Web is replete with tutorial-style content on how to accomplish programming tasks. Unfortunately, even top-ranked tutorials suffer from severe security vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS), and SQL injection (SQLi).…

Background: Open Source Software is the building block of modern software. However, the prevalence of project deprecation in the open source world weakens the integrity of the downstream systems and the broad ecosystem. Therefore it calls…

Software vulnerabilities, caused by unintentional flaws in source code, are a primary root cause of cyberattacks. Static analysis of source code has been widely used to detect these unintentional defects introduced by software developers.…

With the recent explosion in the size and complexity of source codebases and software projects, the need for efficient source code search engines has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, existing information retrieval-based methods fail…