Related papers: Code smells detection and visualization: A systema…

This paper focuses on Code Generation task that aims at generating relevant code fragments according to given natural language descriptions. In the process of software development, developers often encounter two scenarios. One is requested…

Test smells reduce test suite reliability and complicate maintenance. While many methods detect test smells, few support automated removal, and most rely on static analysis or machine learning. This study evaluates models with relatively…

Modern Code Review (MCR) is a widely known practice of software quality assurance. However, the existing body of knowledge of MCR is currently not understood as a whole. Objective: Our goal is to identify the state of the art on MCR,…

Security patch detection (SPD) is crucial for maintaining software security, as unpatched vulnerabilities can lead to severe security risks. In recent years, numerous learning-based SPD approaches have demonstrated promising results on…

Code switching (CS) is a very common phenomenon in written and spoken communication but one that is handled poorly by many natural language processing applications. Looking to the application of building CS corpora, we explore CS language…

Open Source Software (OSS) security and resilience are worldwide phenomena hampering economic and technological innovation. OSS vulnerabilities can cause unauthorized access, data breaches, network disruptions, and privacy violations,…

Bug localization is an important aspect of software maintenance because it can locate modules that should be changed to fix a specific bug. Our previous study showed that the accuracy of the information retrieval (IR)-based bug localization…

Code reasoning tasks are becoming prevalent in large language model (LLM) assessments. Yet, there is a dearth of studies on the impact of real-world complexities on code reasoning, e.g., inter- or intra-procedural dependencies, API calls,…

Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…

Refactorings are transformations to improve the code design without changing overall functionality and observable behavior. During the refactoring process of smelly test code, practitioners may struggle to identify refactoring candidates…

Background: Test smells indicate potential problems in the design and implementation of automated software tests that may negatively impact test code maintainability, coverage, and reliability. When poorly described, manual tests written in…

Representing source code in a generic input format is crucial to automate software engineering tasks, e.g., applying machine learning algorithms to extract information. Visualizing code representations can further enable human experts to…

In this paper, we present a challenging code reasoning task: vulnerability detection. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in natural-language and math reasoning, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) models reported only 54.5%…

As of today the programming language of the vast majority of the published source code is manually specified or programmatically assigned based on the sole file extension. In this paper we show that the source code programming language…

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…

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has changed software development, with tools like Copilot, JetBrains AI Assistant, and others boosting developers' productivity. However, developers now spend more time reviewing code than…

Requirements form the basis for defining software systems' obligations and tasks. Testable requirements help prevent failures, reduce maintenance costs, and make it easier to perform acceptance tests. However, despite the importance of…

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 Review consists in assessing the code written by teammates with the goal of increasing code quality. Empirical studies documented the benefits brought by such a practice that, however, has its cost to pay in terms of developers' time.…

Large language models (LLMs) have become vital tools for software development, but they often require verbose intermediate reasoning for complex code tasks, leading to high latency and costs. This research extends the Chain of Draft (CoD)…