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Developers often have questions about semantic aspects of code they are working on, e.g., "Is there a class whose parent classes declare a conflicting attribute?". Answering them requires understanding code semantics such as attributes and…

We need ways to improve the code quality. Programmers have different level of tenure and experience. Standard and programming languages change and we are forced to re-use legacy code with minimum revision. Programmers develop their habits…

Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…

AlphaCode is a code generation system for assisting software developers in solving competitive programming problems using natural language problem descriptions. Despite the advantages of the code generating system, the open source community…

We describe an intelligent assistant based on mining existing software repositories to help the developer interactively create checkable specifications of code. To be most useful we apply this at the subsystem level, that is chunks of code…

Writing parallel codes is difficult and exhibits a fundamental trade-off between abstraction and performance. The high level language abstractions designed to simplify the complexities of parallelism make certain assumptions that impacts…

Online code clones are code fragments that are copied from software projects or online sources to Stack Overflow as examples. Due to an absence of a checking mechanism after the code has been copied to Stack Overflow, they can become toxic…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the…

An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…

The availability of large-scale datasets, advanced architectures, and powerful computational resources have led to effective code models that automate diverse software engineering activities. The datasets usually consist of billions of…

Programmers often reuse code from source code repositories to reduce the development effort. Code clones are candidates for reuse in exploratory or rapid development, as they represent often repeated functionality in software systems. To…

Consider the case where a programmer has written some part of a program, but has left part of the program (such as a method or a function body) incomplete. The goal is to use the context surrounding the missing code to automatically 'figure…

Traditional defect prediction approaches often use metrics that measure the complexity of the design or implementing code of a software system, such as the number of lines of code in a source file. In this paper, we explore a different…

During maintenance, software developers deal with a number of software change requests. Each of those requests is generally written using natural language texts, and it involves one or more domain related concepts. A developer needs to map…

This study proposes a method to diversify queries in existing test collections to reflect some of the diversity of search engine users, aligning with an earlier vision of an 'ideal' test collection. A Large Language Model (LLM) is used to…

Process variant analysis aims at identifying and addressing the differences existing in a set of process executions enacted by the same process model. A process model can be executed differently in different situations for various reasons,…

Code evolution is a family of techniques that rely on large language models to search through possible computer programs by evolving or mutating existing code. Many proposed code evolution pipelines show impressive performance but are often…

Since programming concepts do not match their syntactic representations, code search is a very tedious task. For instance in Java or C, array doesn't match [], so using "array" as a query, one cannot find what they are looking for. Often…

The recent advancements of Small Language Models (SLMs) have opened new possibilities for efficient code generation. SLMs offer lightweight and cost-effective alternatives to Large Language Models (LLMs), making them attractive for use in…