Related papers: Does Code Quality Affect Pull Request Acceptance? …
Code review is central to software engineering education but hard to scale in capstone projects due to tight deadlines, uneven peer feedback, and limited prior experience. We investigate an LLM-as-reviewer integrated directly into GitHub…
Internship and industry-affiliated capstone projects are popular ways to expose students to real world experiences and bridge the gap between academic training and industry requirements. However, these two approaches often require active…
AI coding agents are now submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, acting not just as assistants but as autonomous contributors. As these agentic contributions are rapidly increasing across real repositories, little is known…
Code quality is an attribute composed of various metrics, such as complexity, readability, testability, interoperability, reusability, and the use of good or bad practices, among others. Static code analysis tools aim to measure a set of…
It is well known that the software process impacts the quality of the resulting product. There are also anecdotal claims that agile processes result in higher level of quality than traditional methodologies. However, still solid evidence of…
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…
Modern programming languages, such as Java and C#, typically provide features that handle exceptions. These features separate error-handling code from regular source code and aim to assist in the practice of software comprehension and…
LLMs are increasingly embedded in programming workflows, from code generation to automated code review. Yet, how gendered communication styles interact with LLM-assisted programming and code review remains underexplored. We present a…
Context: Stack Overflow is a popular community question and answer portal used by practitioners to solve problems during software development. Developers can focus their attention on answers that have been accepted or where members have…
Open Source Software (OSS) projects are typically the result of collective efforts performed by developers with different backgrounds. Although the quality of developers' contributions should be the only factor influencing the evaluation of…
Autonomous coding agents are increasingly deployed as AI teammates in modern software engineering, independently authoring pull requests (PRs) that modify production code at scale. This study aims to systematically characterize how…
LLM-generated code is widely used, and the share of committed code produced by LLMs is expected to increase. However, we are not at a point where LLMs can be effective contributors to production code. We present an approach that exposes the…
As AI agents increasingly contribute to code development and maintenance, there is still limited empirical evidence on the quality and risk characteristics of their changes in real-world projects, particularly for refactoring-oriented…
On the Stack Overflow (SO) Q&A site, users often request solutions to their code-related problems (e.g., errors, unexpected behavior). Unfortunately, they often miss required code snippets during their question submission, which could…
Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…
Context: Code annotations have gained widespread popularity in programming languages, offering developers the ability to attach metadata to code elements to define custom behaviors. Many modern frameworks and APIs use annotations to keep…
Context: Motivation is known to improve performance. In software development in particular, there has been considerable interest in the motivation of contributors to open source. Objective: We identify 11 motivators from the literature…
The increasing adoption of AI coding agents has increased the number of agent-generated pull requests (PRs) merged with little or no human intervention. Although such PRs promise productivity gains, their post-merge code quality remains…
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…
Open source software development has become more social and collaborative, evident GitHub. Since 2016, GitHub started to support more informal methods such as emoji reactions, with the goal to reduce commenting noise when reviewing any code…