Related papers: Does Code Quality Affect Pull Request Acceptance? …

Peer code review locates common coding rule violations and simple logical errors in the early phases of software development, and thus reduces overall cost. However, in GitHub, identifying an appropriate code reviewer for a pull request is…

Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents are advancing quickly, with the increasing leveraging of LLM Agents to assist in development tasks such as code generation. While LLM Agents accelerate code generation, studies indicate they may introduce…

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…

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Code review is a mature practice for software quality assurance in software development with which reviewers check the code that has been committed by developers, and verify the quality of code. During the code review discussions, reviewers…

The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…

Pull request latency evaluation is an essential application of effort evaluation in the pull-based development scenario. It can help the reviewers sort the pull request queue, remind developers about the review processing time, speed up the…

Developers use tools such as GitHub pull requests to review code, discuss proposed changes, and request modifications. While changed files are commonly presented in alphabetical order, this does not necessarily coincide with the reviewer's…

To create unit tests, it may be necessary to refactor the production code, e.g. by widening access to specific methods or by decomposing classes into smaller units that are easier to test independently. We report on an extensive study to…

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…

Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

Code review that detects and locates defects and other quality issues plays an important role in software quality control. One type of issue that may impact the quality of software is code smells. Yet, little is known about the extent to…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…

The migration process between different third-party software libraries is hard, complex and error-prone. Typically, during a library migration process, developers opt to replace methods from the retired library with other methods from a new…

Code review is a key element of quality assurance in software development. Determining the right reviewer for a given code change requires understanding the characteristics of the changed code, identifying the skills of each potential…

Background: Pull-based development has shaped the practice of Modern Code Review (MCR), in which reviewers can contribute code improvements, such as refactorings, through comments and commits in Pull Requests (PRs). Past MCR studies…

Programming education should aim to provide students with a broad range of skills that they will later use while developing software. An important aspect in this is their ability to write code that is not only correct but also of high…