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Security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are crucial for ensuring software security. However, their misuse introduces vulnerabilities, potentially leading to severe data breaches and substantial financial loss. Complex API design,…

Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…

Usability issues that exist in security APIs cause programmers to embed those security APIs incorrectly to the applications they develop. This results in introduction of security vulnerabilities to those applications. One of the main…

Knowing what sensitive resources a dependency could potentially access would help developers assess the risk of a dependency before selection. One way to get an understanding of the potential sensitive resource usage by a dependency is…

Scripting languages are continuously gaining popularity due to their ease of use and the flourishing software ecosystems that surround them. These languages offer crash and memory safety by design, thus, developers do not need to understand…

APIs are the primary mechanism for developers to gain access to externally defined services and tools. However, previous research has revealed API misuses that violate the contract of APIs to be prevalent. Such misuses can have harmful…

A rapidly growing body of research is examining how LLMs influence developers when they code. To date, this research has tended to focus on productivity and code quality outcomes, rather than the underlying cognitive processes involved in…

Context: Cryptographic APIs are said to be not usable and researchers suggest to add example code to the documentation. Aim: We wanted to create a free platform for cryptographic code examples that improves the usability and security of…

Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…

Microservices expose their functionality via remote Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), e.g., based on HTTP or asynchronous messaging technology. To solve recurring problems in this design space, Microservice API Patterns (MAPs) have…

The incorporation and adaptation of style guides play an essential role in software development, influencing code formatting, naming conventions, and structure to enhance readability and simplify maintenance. However, many of these guides…

AI coding assistants have become prolific in recent years. Through a longitudinal mixed-methods investigation, we examined how professional software engineers perceive the effects of AI coding assistants in regard to task focus, developer…

We investigate how code obfuscation influences human understanding of programs through an output-prediction task. To study this effect, we construct multiple levels of obfuscation, ranging from unobfuscated code to transformations involving…

Java platform and third-party libraries provide various security features to facilitate secure coding. However, misusing these features can cost tremendous time and effort of developers or cause security vulnerabilities in software. Prior…

Novice programmers often struggle through programming problem solving due to a lack of metacognitive awareness and strategies. Previous research has shown that novices can encounter multiple metacognitive difficulties while programming.…

The learning and usage of an API is supported by official documentation. Like source code, API documentation is itself a software product. Several research results show that bad design in API documentation can make the reuse of API features…

With the advent and proliferation of online developer forums as informal documentation, developers often share their opinions about the APIs they use. Thus, opinions of others often shape the developer's perception and decisions related to…

The software engineering community recently has witnessed widespread deployment of AI programming assistants, such as GitHub Copilot. However, in practice, developers do not accept AI programming assistants' initial suggestions at a high…

API misuse introduces security vulnerabilities, system failures, and increases maintenance costs, all of which remain critical challenges in software development. Existing detection approaches rely on static analysis or machine…

Java platform provides various APIs to facilitate secure coding. However, correctly using security APIs is usually challenging for developers who lack cybersecurity training. Prior work shows that many developers misuse security APIs; such…