Related papers: Optimising the Fit of Stack Overflow Code Snippets…

Developers use Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to exchange knowledge and expertise. Stack Overflow is a popular Q&A website where developers discuss coding problems and share code examples. Although all Stack Overflow posts are free to…

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…

Finding the same or similar code snippets in source code is one of fundamental activities in software maintenance. Text-based pattern matching tools such as grep is frequently used for such purpose, but making proper queries for the…

Source code search plays an important role in software development, e.g. for exploratory development or opportunistic reuse of existing code from a code base. Often, exploration of different implementations with the same functionality is…

Software reuse is a crucial external quality attribute targeted by open-source and commercial projects. Despite that software reuse has experienced an increased adoption throughout the years, little is known about what aspects of code reuse…

In recent years, code security has become increasingly important, especially with the rise of interconnected technologies. Detecting vulnerabilities early in the software development process has demonstrated numerous benefits. Consequently,…

We propose using natural language outlines as a novel modality and interaction surface for providing AI assistance to developers throughout the software development process. An NL outline for a code function comprises multiple statements…

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…

Determining the programming language of a source code file has been considered in the research community; it has been shown that Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms can be effective in identifying the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential to enhance software development through automated code generation and refactoring, reducing development time and improving code quality. This study empirically evaluates StarCoder2, an LLM…

Frequent modifications of unit test cases are inevitable due to software's continuous underlying changes in source code, design, and requirements. Since manually maintaining software test suites is tedious, timely, and costly, automating…

While constructing supervised learning models, we require labelled examples to build a corpus and train a machine learning model. However, most studies have built the labelled dataset manually, which in many occasions is a daunting task. To…

Formal Methods tools will never have as many users as tools for popular programming languages and so the effort spent on constructing Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) will be orders of magnitudes lower than that of programming…

We as software developers or researchers very often get stacktrace error messages while we are trying to write some code or install some packages. Many times these error messages are very obscure and verbose; do not make much sense to us.…

Online programming discussion platforms such as Stack Overflow serve as a rich source of information for software developers. Available information include vibrant discussions and oftentimes ready-to-use code snippets. Anecdotes report that…

We propose a framework to mine API usage scenarios from Stack Overflow. Each task consists of a code example, the task description, and the reactions of developers towards the code example. First, we present an algorithm to automatically…

Code retrieval is a common practice for programmers to reuse existing code snippets in open-source repositories. Given a user query (i.e., a natural language description), code retrieval aims at searching for the most relevant ones from a…

Traditionally, we have two possibilities to design tools for program comprehension and analysis. The first option is to create a standalone program, independent of any source code editor. This way, the act of source code editing is…

A great part of software development involves conceptualizing or communicating the underlying procedures and logic that needs to be expressed in programs. One major difficulty of programming is turning concept into code, especially when…

Software developers are increasingly dependent on question and answer portals and blogs for coding solutions. While such interfaces provide useful information, there are concerns that code hosted here is often incorrect, insecure or…