Related papers: Comparing the Results of Replications in Software …
Encodings or the proof of their absence are the main way to compare process calculi. To analyse the quality of encodings and to rule out trivial or meaningless encodings, they are augmented with quality criteria. There exists a bunch of…
Simulation has emerged as a popular method to study the long-term societal consequences of recommender systems. This approach allows researchers to specify their theoretical model explicitly and observe the evolution of system-level…
Imitation learning practitioners have often noted that conditioning policies on previous actions leads to a dramatic divergence between "held out" error and performance of the learner in situ. Interactive approaches can provably address…
[Background] A well-formulated research problem is essential for achieving practical relevance in Software Engineering (SE), yet there is a lack of structured guidance in this early phase. [Aims] Our goal is to introduce and evaluate seven…
Evidence-based practice (EBP) in software engineering aims to improve decision-making in software development by complementing practitioners' professional judgment with high-quality evidence from research. We believe the use of EBP…
Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far,…
Test or prove? These two approaches to software verification have long been presented as opposites. One is dynamic, the other static: a test executes the program, a proof only analyzes the program text. A different perspective is emerging,…
Accurately predicting faulty software units helps practitioners target faulty units and prioritize their efforts to maintain software quality. Prior studies use machine-learning models to detect faulty software code. We revisit past studies…
Context: Software testing plays an essential role in product quality improvement. For this reason, several software testing models have been developed to support organizations. However, adoption of testing process models inside…
Reinforcement learning is increasingly used for code-centric tasks. These tasks include code generation, summarization, understanding, repair, testing, and optimization. This trend is growing faster with large language models and autonomous…
Context: Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) have been adopted within Software Engineering (SE) for more than a decade to provide meaningful summaries of evidence on several topics. Many of these SLRs are now potentially not fully…
With the growing reliance on automated code completion tools in software development, the need for comprehensive evaluation benchmarks has become critical. Existing benchmarks focus more on code completion in function and class level by…
Background: The standard regulatory approach to assess replication success is the two-trials rule, requiring both the original and the replication study to be significant with effect estimates in the same direction. The sceptical p-value…
Code clone detection is involved with detecting duplicated fragments of code within a code base. Detecting these clones is useful for maintenance operations which require editing the clones. The tools developed are expected to be robust…
Novel reinforcement learning algorithms, or improvements on existing ones, are commonly justified by evaluating their performance on benchmark environments and are compared to an ever-changing set of standard algorithms. However, despite…
Various fields of science face a reproducibility crisis. For quantum software engineering as an emerging field, it is therefore imminent to focus on proper reproducibility engineering from the start. Yet the provision of reproduction…
Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…
Geo-replicated systems provide a number of desirable properties such as globally low latency, high availability, scalability, and built-in fault tolerance. Unfortunately, programming correct applications on top of such systems has proven to…
The reproducibility crisis has led to an increasing number of replication studies being conducted. Sample sizes for replication studies are often calculated using conditional power based on the effect estimate from the original study.…
One typical use case of large-scale distributed computing in data centers is to decompose a computation job into many independent tasks and run them in parallel on different machines, sometimes known as the "embarrassingly parallel"…