Related papers: Can We Benchmark Code Review Studies? A Systematic…
Current benchmarks for coding evaluate language models (LMs) on concrete, well-specified tasks such as fixing specific bugs or writing targeted tests. However, human programmers do not spend all day incessantly addressing isolated tasks.…
While the methodological rigor of computing research has improved considerably in the past two decades, quantitative software engineering research is hampered by immature measures and inattention to theory. Measurement-the principled…
Peer code review is a widely adopted software engineering practice to ensure code quality and ensure software reliability in both the commercial and open-source software projects. Due to the large effort overhead associated with practicing…
Background: Given the social aspects of Software Engineering (SE), in the last twenty years, researchers from the field started using research methods common in social sciences such as case study, ethnography, and grounded theory. More…
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…
Synthetic verification techniques such as generating test cases and reward modelling are common ways to enhance the coding capabilities of large language models (LLM) beyond predefined tests. Additionally, code verification has recently…
Background: The field of software testing is growing and rapidly-evolving. Aims: Based on keywords assigned to publications, we seek to identify predominant research topics and understand how they are connected and have evolved. Method: We…
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…
Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice to improve the understandability and maintainability of the source code. The Extract Method refactoring is considered as "Swiss army knife" of refactorings,…
The code review comment (CRC) is pivotal in the process of modern code review. It provides reviewers with the opportunity to identify potential bugs, offer constructive feedback, and suggest improvements. Clear and concise code review…
Code review is an essential component of software development, playing a vital role in ensuring a comprehensive check of code changes. However, the continuous influx of pull requests and the limited pool of available reviewer candidates…
Software engineering agents have shown significant promise in writing code. As AI agents permeate code writing, and generate huge volumes of code automatically -- the matter of code quality comes front and centre. As the automatically…
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…
Context: Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) drives innovation in SE through qualitative and quantitative studies. However, concerns about the correct application of empirical methodologies have existed since the 2006 Dagstuhl seminar on…
To ensure that Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively support user productivity, they need to be adjusted. Existing Code Readability (CR) models can guide this alignment. However, there are concerns about their relevance in modern…
BACKGROUND: Software Process Improvement (SPI) is a systematic approach to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of a software development organization and to enhance software products. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to identify and…
Source code summarization involves creating brief descriptions of source code in natural language. These descriptions are a key component of software documentation such as JavaDocs. Automatic code summarization is a prized target of…
The readability of source code is key for understanding and maintaining software systems and tests. Several studies investigate the readability of source code, but there is limited research on the readability of test code and related…
In recent years, many studies have applied wearable devices to capture psychophysiological data from software developers. However, the current literature lacks investigations that classify the studies and point out gaps to be explored. This…
The reproduction and replication of novel results has become a major issue for a number of scientific disciplines. In computer science and related computational disciplines such as systems biology, the issues closely revolve around the…