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Modern Code Review (MCR) plays a key role in software quality practices. In MCR process, a new patch (i.e., a set of code changes) is encouraged to be examined by reviewers in order to identify weaknesses in source code prior to an…
The software development community has been using code quality metrics for the last five decades. Despite their wide adoption, code quality metrics have attracted a fair share of criticism. In this paper, first, we carry out a qualitative…
Is the quality of existing code correlated with the quality of subsequent changes? According to the (controversial) broken windows theory, which inspired this study, disorder sets descriptive norms and signals behavior that further…
Software code quality is a construct with three dimensions: maintainability, reliability, and functionality. Although many firms have incorporated code quality metrics in their operations, evaluating these metrics still lacks consistent…
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…
Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up…
Code comments are important artifacts in software systems and play a paramount role in many software engineering (SE) tasks related to maintenance and program comprehension. However, while it is widely accepted that high quality matters in…
Code readability and software complexity are important software quality metrics that impact other software metrics such as maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability. This paper presents an empirical study of the…
The most popular code review tools (e.g., Gerrit and GitHub) present the files to review sorted in alphabetical order. Could this choice or, more generally, the relative position in which a file is presented bias the outcome of code…
Recent years have experienced growing contributions of AI coding agents that assist human developers in various software engineering tasks. However, this growing AI-assisted autonomy raises questions about security and trust. In this paper,…
Software developers often look for solutions to their code-level problems using the Stack Overflow Q&A website. To receive help, developers frequently submit questions containing sample code segments and the description of the programming…
Software development is a collaborative process that involves various interactions among individuals and teams. TODO comments in source code play a critical role in managing and coordinating diverse tasks during this process. However, this…
Motivation: The question of what combination of attributes drives the adoption of a particular software technology is critical to developers. It determines both those technologies that receive wide support from the community and those which…
Context: Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. Numerous empirical studies investigating the impact of refactoring activities on software quality have been conducted over the last two decades.…
The popularity of machine learning has wildly expanded in recent years. Machine learning techniques have been heatedly studied in academia and applied in the industry to create business value. However, there is a lack of guidelines for code…
This paper describes the results of a large (+1100 responses) survey of professional software developers concerning standards for naming source code methods. The various standards for source code method names are derived from and supported…
The rise of large language models for code has reshaped software development. Autonomous coding agents, able to create branches, open pull requests, and perform code reviews, now actively contribute to real-world projects. Their growing…
Fault-proneness is an indication of programming errors that decreases software quality and maintainability. On the contrary, code smell is a symptom of potential design problems which has impact on fault-proneness. In the literature,…
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,…
Context. Modern Code Review (MCR) is being adopted in both open source and commercial projects as a common practice. MCR is a widely acknowledged quality assurance practice that allows early detection of defects as well as poor coding…