Related papers: Atoms of Confusion in Java
Computer programs do not always work as expected. In fact, ominous warnings about the desperate state of the software industry continue to be released with almost ritualistic regularity. In this paper, we look at the 60 years history of…
Source code summarization involves creating brief descriptions of source code in natural language. These descriptions are a key component of software documentation such as JavaDocs. Automatic code summarization is a prized target of…
During testing, developers can place oracles externally or internally with respect to a method. Given a faulty execution state, i.e., one that differs from the expected one, an oracle might be unable to expose the fault if it is placed at a…
Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…
Foundations of formal languages, as subfield of theoretical computer science, are part of typical upper secondary education curricula. There is very little research on the potential difficulties that students at this level have with this…
Recent advances in neural modeling for bug detection have been very promising. More specifically, using snippets of code to create continuous vectors or \textit{embeddings} has been shown to be very good at method name prediction and…
Due to the fragility of quantum mechanical effects, real quantum computers are plagued by frequent noise effects that cause errors during computations. Quantum error-correcting codes address this problem by providing means to identify and…
Researchers, students and practitioners often encounter a situation when the build process of a third-party software system fails. In this paper, we aim to confirm this observation present mainly as anecdotal evidence so far. Using a…
Background: Previous studies have shown that up to 99.59 % of the Java apps using crypto APIs misuse the API at least once. However, these studies have been conducted on Java and C, while empirical studies for other languages are missing.…
Concatenating quantum error correction codes scales error correction capability by driving logical error rates down double-exponentially across levels. However, the noise structure shifts under concatenation, making it hard to choose an…
The main ideas of quantum error correction are introduced. These are encoding, extraction of syndromes, error operators, and code construction. It is shown that general noise and relaxation of a set of 2-state quantum systems can always be…
In the field of automated program repair, the redundancy assumption claims large programs contain the seeds of their own repair. However, most redundancy-based program repair techniques do not reason about the repair ingredients---the code…
Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks requiring complex reasoning, such as code generation, mathematical problem solving, and algorithmic synthesis -- especially when aided by reasoning tokens and…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…
Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…
Code Smell, similar to a bad smell, is a surface indication of something tainted but in terms of software writing practices. This metric is an indication of a deeper problem lies within the code and is associated with an issue which is…
Dynamic language features are widely available in programming languages to implement functionality that can adapt to multiple usage contexts, enabling reuse. Functionality such as data binding , object-relational mapping and user interface…
Recent advancements in quantum computing software are gradually increasing the scope and size of quantum programs being developed. At the same time, however, these larger programs provide more possibilities for functional errors that are…
Unit tests often lack concise summaries that convey test intent, especially in auto-generated or poorly documented codebases. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution, but their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are…