Related papers: On the diversity and frequency of code related to …
Software applications integrate more and more open-source software (OSS) to benefit from code reuse. As a drawback, each vulnerability discovered in bundled OSS potentially affects the application. Upon the disclosure of every new…
In the evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs) tailored for software engineering, the need for benchmarks that accurately reflect real-world development scenarios is paramount. Current benchmarks are either too simplistic or fail…
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…
Unlike most other software quality attributes, testability cannot be evaluated solely based on the characteristics of the source code. The effectiveness of the test suite and the budget assigned to the test highly impact the testability of…
A source code summary of a subroutine is a brief description of that subroutine. Summaries underpin a majority of documentation consumed by programmers, such as the method summaries in JavaDocs. Source code summarization is the task of…
Source code is rarely written in isolation. It depends significantly on the programmatic context, such as the class that the code would reside in. To study this phenomenon, we introduce the task of generating class member functions given…
In software engineering, it is not enough to simply write code that only works as intended, even if it is free from vulnerabilities and bugs. Every programming language has a style guide and a set of best practices defined by its community,…
Test Impact Analysis is an approach to obtain a subset of tests impacted by code changes. This approach is mainly applied to unit testing where the link between the code and its associated tests is easy to obtain. On the integration level,…
During compilation from Java source code to bytecode, some information is irreversibly lost. In other words, compilation and decompilation of Java code is not symmetric. Consequently, the decompilation process, which aims at producing…
Software design debt aims to elucidate the rectification attempts of the present design flaws and studies the influence of those to the cost and time of the software. Design smells are a key cause of incurring design debt. Although the…
[Background] In large open-source software projects, development knowledge is often fragmented across multiple artefacts and contributors such that individual stakeholders are generally unaware of the full breadth of the product features.…
Programming languages are essential tools for developers, and their evolution plays a crucial role in supporting the activities of developers. One instance of programming language evolution is the introduction of syntactic sugars, which are…
Many algorithmic steps require more than one statement to implement, but not big enough to be a method (e.g., add element, find the maximum, determine a value, etc.). These steps are generally implemented by loops. Internal comments for the…
Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…
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…
Neutral program variants are functionally similar to an original program, yet implement slightly different behaviors. Techniques such as approximate computing or genetic improvement share the intuition that potential for enhancements lies…
This paper presents Megadiff, a dataset of source code diffs. It focuses on Java, with strict inclusion criteria based on commit message and diff size. Megadiff contains 663 029 Java diffs that can be used for research on commit…
Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…
Abridged: Programmer attention represents the visual focus of programmers on parts of the source code in pursuit of programming tasks. We conducted an in-depth human study with 10 Java programmers, where each programmer generated summaries…
As one of the most well-known programmer Q&A websites, Stack Overflow (i.e., SO) is serving tens of thousands of developers every day. Previous work has shown that many developers reuse the code snippets on SO when they find an answer (from…