Related papers: LitterBox: A Linter for Scratch Programs

Blocks-based programming has become the lingua franca for introductory coding. Studies have found that experience with blocks-based programming can help beginners learn more traditional text-based languages. We explore how blocks…

As quantum computing is rising in popularity, the amount of quantum programs and the number of developers writing them are increasing rapidly. Unfortunately, writing correct quantum programs is challenging due to various subtle rules…

Recent research in Needle-in-a-Haystack (NIAH) benchmarks has explored the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in retrieving contextual information from large text documents. However, as LLMs become increasingly integrated into…

The importance of programming education has lead to dedicated educational programming environments, where users visually arrange block-based programming constructs that typically control graphical, interactive game-like programs. The…

Using open-source dependencies is essential in modern software development. However, this practice implies significant trust in third-party code, while there is little support for developers to assess this trust. As a consequence, attacks…

\underline{Context:} Logging is a fundamental yet complex practice in software engineering, essential for monitoring, debugging, and auditing software systems. With the increasing integration of machine learning (ML) components into…

Java remains one of the most popular programming languages in education. Although Java programming education is well supported by study materials, learners also need more immediate support on the problems they face in their own code. When…

Computational notebooks became indispensable tools for research-related development, offering unprecedented interactivity and flexibility in the development process. However, these benefits come at the cost of reproducibility and an…

Debugging denotes the process of detecting root causes of unexpected observable behaviors in programs, such as a program crash, an unexpected output value being produced or an assertion violation. Debugging of program errors is a difficult…

Good code style improves program readability, maintainability, and collaboration, and is an integral component of software quality. Developers, however, often cut corners when following style rules, leading to the wide adoption of tools…

In machine learning, contamination refers to situations where testing data leak into the training set. The issue is particularly relevant for the evaluation of the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), which are generally trained on…

We introduce MPLSandbox, an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). It can automatically identify the…

Learners are often introduced to programming via dedicated languages such as Scratch, where block-based commands are assembled visually in order to control the interactions of graphical sprites. Automated testing of such programs is an…

Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…

Code smells as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Many times they are the result of so called technical debt. Our study showed that the interest in code smells research is increasing. However, most of the publications are…

As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These…

The Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in code-related tasks. However, most research focuses on improving the output quality of LLMs (e.g., correctness), and less attention has been paid to the LLM input (e.g.,…

Detecting tricky bugs in plausible programs, those that pass existing test suites yet still contain bugs, remains a significant challenge in software testing. To address this problem, we propose TrickCatcher, an LLM-powered approach to…

Bug patterns are erroneous code idioms or bad coding practices that have been proved to fail time and time again, which are usually caused by the misunderstanding of a programming language's features, the use of erroneous design patterns,…

Integrated Development Environments shape developers' daily experience, yet the empirical study of their usability and user experience (UX) remains limited. This work presents an LLM-assisted approach to detecting UX smells in Visual Studio…