Related papers: Developer Reading Behavior While Summarizing Java …

Code annotations is a widely used feature in Java systems to configure custom metadata on programming elements. Their increasing presence creates the need for approaches to assess and comprehend their usage and distribution. In this…

Software visualizations are usually realized as standalone and isolated tools that use embedded code viewers within the visualization. In the context of program comprehension, only few approaches integrate visualizations into code editors,…

Software refactoring plays an important role in software engineering. Developers often turn to refactoring when they want to restructure software to improve its quality without changing its external behavior. Studies show that small-scale…

Background: Automated code summarisation supports program comprehension and documentation, yet the relative strengths and limitations of deterministic (heuristic-based) and probabilistic (LLM-based) pipelines remain unclear. Aims: This…

This research delves into understanding the behaviors and characteristics of Chinese developers in relation to their use of technical documentation, which is crucial for creating high-quality developer documentation. We conducted interviews…

Modern software development requires developers to find and effectively utilize new APIs and their documentation, but documentation has many well-known issues. Despite this, developers eventually overcome these issues but have no way of…

One of the first steps to perform most of the software maintenance activities, such as updating features or fixing bugs, is to have a relatively good understanding of the program's source code which is often written by other developers. A…

Code comments are important for program comprehension, development, and maintenance tasks. Given the varying standards for code comments, and their unstructured or semi-structured nature, developers get easily confused (especially novice…

Teachers' visual attention and its distribution across the students in classrooms can constitute important implications for student engagement, achievement, and professional teacher training. Despite that, inferring the information about…

This paper studies the relationship between human eye gaze time on words in source code and the Semantic Neighborhood Density (SND) of those words. Human eye gaze time is a popular way to quantify human attention such as the importance of…

Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…

This paper introduces the Java Software Evolution Tracker, a visualization and analysis tool that provides practitioners the means to examine the evolution of a software system from a top to bottom perspective, starting with changes in the…

There has been a growing interest in developing machine learning (ML) models for code summarization tasks, e.g., comment generation and method naming. Despite substantial increase in the effectiveness of ML models, the evaluation…

User Interfaces (UIs) intensively rely on event-driven programming: widgets send UI events, which capture users' interactions, to dedicated objects called controllers. Controllers use several UI listeners that handle these events to produce…

In Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) experiments the user's gaze motion on web pages is often recorded with eye tracking. The data is used to analyze gaze behavior or to identify Areas of Interest (AOI) the user has looked at. So far,…

Software testing is one of the very important Quality Assurance (QA) components. A lot of researchers deal with the testing process in terms of tester motivation and how tests should or should not be written. However, it is not known from…

Decision-making is a key software engineering skill. Developers constantly make choices throughout the software development process, from requirements to implementation. While prior work has studied developer decision-making, the choices…

Worked examples (solutions to typical programming problems presented as a source code in a certain language and are used to explain the topics from a programming class) are among the most popular types of learning content in programming…

During compilation from Java source code to bytecode, some information is irreversibly lost. In other words, compilation and decompilation of Java code is not symmetric. Consequently, the decompilation process, which aims at producing…

Developers often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…