Related papers: An Inquisitive Code Editor for Addressing Novice P…

Bias is an inherent threat to human decision-making, including in decisions made during software development. Extensive research has demonstrated the presence of biases at various stages of the software development life-cycle. Notably, code…

AI-assisted development tools promise productivity gains and improved code quality, yet their adoption among developers remains inconsistent. Prior research suggests that professional expertise influences technology adoption, but its role…

There is a conflict between the need for security compliance by users and the fact that commonly they cannot afford to dedicate much of their time and energy to that security. A balanced level of user engagement in security is difficult to…

Code review is widely known as one of the best practices for software quality assurance in software development. In a typical code review process, reviewers check the code committed by developers to ensure the quality of the code, during…

Executing code is essential for various program analysis tasks, e.g., to detect bugs that manifest through exceptions or to obtain execution traces for further dynamic analysis. However, executing an arbitrary piece of code is often…

Dynamically typed programming languages are popular in education and the software industry. While presenting a low barrier to entry, they suffer from run-time type errors and longer-term problems in code quality and maintainability.…

We examine "vibe coding": an emerging programming paradigm where developers primarily write code by interacting with code-generating large language models rather than writing code directly. We present the first empirical study of vibe…

The source code of a program not only defines its semantics but also contains subtle clues that can identify its author. Several studies have shown that these clues can be automatically extracted using machine learning and allow for…

With the popularity of automatic code generation tools, such as Copilot, the study of the potential hazards of these tools is gaining importance. In this work, we explore the social bias problem in pre-trained code generation models. We…

Code review is a well-established and valued practice in the software engineering community contributing to both code quality and interpersonal benefits. However, there are challenges in both tools and processes that give rise to…

Following the rise of large language models (LLMs), many studies have emerged in recent years focusing on exploring the adoption of LLM-based tools for software development by novice developers: computer science/software engineering…

In programming education, teachers need to monitor and assess the progress of their students by investigating the code they write. Code quality of programs written in traditional programming languages can be automatically assessed with…

Software engineering has long studied how software developers work, building a body of work which forms the foundation of many software engineering best practices, tools, and theories. Recently, some developers have begun recording videos…

Code review is a mature practice for software quality assurance in software development with which reviewers check the code that has been committed by developers, and verify the quality of code. During the code review discussions, reviewers…

Often, a good explanation for a program's unexpected behavior is a bug in the programmer's code. But sometimes, an even better explanation is a bug in the programmer's mental model of the language or API they are using. Instead of merely…

When teaching Programming and Software Engineering in Bachelor's Degree programs, the emphasis on creating functional software projects often overshadows the focus on software quality, a trend that aligns with ACM curricula recommendations.…

Adapting pre-trained deep learning models to customized tasks has become a popular choice for developers to cope with limited computational resources and data volume. More specifically, probing--training a downstream head on a pre-trained…

With their remarkable ability to generate code, large language models (LLMs) are a transformative technology for computing education practice. They have created an urgent need for educators to rethink pedagogical approaches and teaching…

Novice programmers often struggle with the formal syntax of programming languages. To assist them, we design a novel programming language correction framework amenable to reinforcement learning. The framework allows an agent to mimic human…

Programming language definitions assign formal meaning to complete programs. Programmers, however, spend a substantial amount of time interacting with incomplete programs -- programs with holes, type inconsistencies and binding…