Related papers: Is Less Really More? Why Reducing Code Reuse Gadge…

Automated tests play an important role in software evolution because they can rapidly detect faults introduced during changes. In practice, code-coverage metrics are often used as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites with…

Data deduplication, one of the key features of modern Big Data storage devices, is the process of removing replicas of data chunks stored by different users. Despite the importance of deduplication, several drawbacks of the method, such as…

Software vulnerabilities often persist or re-emerge even after being fixed, revealing the complex interplay between code evolution and socio-technical factors. While source code metrics provide useful indicators of vulnerabilities, software…

Systematic application of software metric techniques can lead to significant improvements of the quality of a final software product. However, there is still the evident lack of wider utilization of software metrics techniques and tools due…

In recent years, defect prediction has received a great deal of attention in the empirical software engineering world. Predicting software defects before the maintenance phase is very important not only to decrease the maintenance costs but…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

Unlike code completion, debugging requires localizing faults and applying targeted edits. We observe that frontier LLMs often regenerate correct but over-edited solutions during debugging. To evaluate how far LLMs are from precise…

The effectiveness of AI debugging follows a predictable exponential decay pattern; most models lose 60-80% of their debugging capability within just 2-3 attempts, despite iterative debugging being a critical capability for practical code…

Nowadays, an increasing number of applications uses deserialization. This technique, based on rebuilding the instance of objects from serialized byte streams, can be dangerous since it can open the application to attacks such as remote code…

Program debloating aims to enhance the performance and reduce the attack surface of bloated applications. Several techniques have been recently proposed to specialize programs. These approaches are either based on unsound strategies or…

Enterprise networks are in constant danger of being breached by cyber-attackers, but making the decision about what security tools to deploy to mitigate this risk requires carefully designed evaluation of security products. One of the most…

Many debugging tools rely on compiler-produced metadata to present a source-language view of program states, such as variable values and source line numbers. While this tends to work for unoptimised programs, current compilers often…

Software clones have been an active area of research for the past two decades. However, although numerous clone detection tools are now available, only a small fraction of the literature has focused on tool evaluation, and this is in fact…

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have been increasingly used by developers to boost productivity, but they often generate vulnerable code. Thus, there is an urgent need to ensure that code generated by Code LLMs is correct and secure.…

Embedded Systems (ES) development has been historically focused on functionality rather than security, and today it still applies in many sectors and applications. However, there is an increasing number of security threats over ES, and a…

Programs are bloated. Our study shows that only 5% of libc is used on average across the Ubuntu Desktop environment (2016 programs); the heaviest user, vlc media player, only needed 18%. In this paper: (1) We present a debloating framework…

Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…

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,…

Software defects rediscovered by a large number of customers affect various stakeholders and may: 1) hint at gaps in a software manufacturer's Quality Assurance (QA) processes, 2) lead to an over-load of a software manufacturer's support…

Code search engine is an essential tool in software development. Many code search methods have sprung up, focusing on the overall ranking performance of code search. In this paper, we study code search from another perspective by analyzing…