Related papers: Replacements and Replaceables: Making the Case for…

Program code contains functions, variables, and data structures that are represented by names. To promote human understanding, these names should describe the role and use of the code elements they represent. But the names given by…

Code review is widely known as one of the best practices for software quality assurance in software development. In a typical code review process, reviewers check the code committed by developers to ensure the quality of the code, during…

The immense amounts of source code provide ample challenges and opportunities during software development. To handle the size of code bases, developers commonly search for code, e.g., when trying to find where a particular feature is…

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…

Consistency is one of the keys to maintainable source code and hence a successful software project. We propose a novel method of extracting the intent of programmers from source code of a large project (~300kLOC) and checking the semantic…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

Despite the unarguable importance of Stack Overflow (SO) for the daily work of many software developers and despite existing knowledge about the impact of code duplication on software maintainability, the prevalence and implications of code…

Code search engines usually use readability feature to rank code snippets. There are several metrics to calculate this feature, but developers may have different perceptions about readability. Correlation between readability and…

Software systems are getting more complex as the system grows where maintaining such system is a primary concern for the industry. Code clone is one of the factors making software maintenance more difficult. It is a process of replicating…

Code clones are code snippets that are identical or similar to other snippets within the same or different files. They are often created through copy-and-paste practices during development and maintenance activities. Since code clones may…

The automatic generation of source code is one of the long-lasting dreams in software engineering research. Several techniques have been proposed to speed up the writing of new code. For example, code completion techniques can recommend to…

Software Interfaces are meant to describe contracts governing interactions between logic modules. Interfaces, if well designed, significantly reduce software complexity and ease maintainability . However, as software evolves, the…

Having similar code fragments, also called clones, in software systems can lead to unnecessary comprehension, review and change efforts. Syntactically similar clones can often be encountered in practice. The same is not clear for only…

We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…

Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

AI foundation models have the capability to produce a wide array of responses to a single prompt, a feature that is highly beneficial in software engineering to generate diverse code solutions. However, this advantage introduces a…

Naming is very important in software development, as names are often the only vehicle of meaning about what the code is intended to do. A recent study on how developers choose names collected the names given by different developers for the…

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…

Code clones are code snippets that are identical or similar to other snippets within the same or different files. They are often created through copy-and-paste practices and modified during development and maintenance activities. Since a…