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

Identifier names, which comprise a significant portion of the codebase, are the cornerstone of effective program comprehension. However, research has shown that poorly chosen names can significantly increase cognitive load and hinder…

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

Research at the intersection of machine learning, programming languages, and software engineering has recently taken important steps in proposing learnable probabilistic models of source code that exploit code's abundance of patterns. In…

Software systems are evolving by adding new functions and modifying existing functions over time. Through the evolution, the structure of software is becoming more complex and so the understandability and maintainability of software systems…

A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

This research paper aims to find, analyze and understand code patterns in any software system and measure its quality by defining standards and proposing a formula for the same. Every code that is written can be divided into different code…

In software development, it is common for programmers to copy-paste or port code snippets and then adapt them to their use case. This scenario motivates the code adaptation task -- a variant of program repair which aims to adapt variable…

In Open Source Software, resources of any project are open for reuse by introducing dependencies or copying the resource itself. In contrast to dependency-based reuse, the infrastructure to systematically support copy-based reuse appears to…

Code search is a widely used technique by developers during software development. It provides semantically similar implementations from a large code corpus to developers based on their queries. Existing techniques leverage deep learning…

Requirements and code, in conventional software engineering wisdom, belong to entirely different worlds. Is it possible to unify these two worlds? A unified framework could help make software easier to change and reuse. To explore the…

To remain useful for their users, software systems need to continuously enhance and extend their functionality. Nevertheless, in many object-oriented applications, features are not represented explicitly. The lack of modularization is known…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

To refactor already working code while keeping reliability, compatibility and perhaps security, we can borrow ideas from micropass/nanopass compilers. By treating the procedure of software refactoring as composing code transformations, and…

Code review is a common practice in software development and often conducted before code changes are merged into the code repository. A number of approaches for automatically recommending appropriate reviewers have been proposed to match…

Code cloning is an important software engineering aspect. It is a common software reuse principle that consists of duplicating source code within a program or across different systems owned or maintained by the same entity. There are…

GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…

Due to their pivotal role in software engineering, considerable effort is spent on the quality assurance of software requirements specifications. As they are mainly described in natural language, relatively few means of automated quality…

Binary code similarity approaches compare two or more pieces of binary code to identify their similarities and differences. The ability to compare binary code enables many real-world applications on scenarios where source code may not be…

Background: Modern Code Review (MCR) is a key component for delivering high-quality software and sharing knowledge among developers. Effective reviews require an in-depth understanding of the code and demand from the reviewers to…