Related papers: Does Code Review Promote Conformance? A Study of O…

Code reviews are an integral part of software development and have been recognized as a crucial practice for minimizing bugs and favouring higher code quality. They serve as an important checkpoint before committing code and play an…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

The speed at which code changes are integrated into the software codebase, also referred to as code review velocity, is a prevalent industry metric for improved throughput and developer satisfaction. While prior studies have explored…

How should two language models interact to produce better code than either can alone? The conventional approach -- a reasoning model plans, a code specialist implements -- seems natural but fails: on HumanEval+, plan-then-code degrades…

Background: Despite a growing body of literature on the impact of software bots on open source software development teams, their effects on team communication, coordination, and collaboration practices are not well understood. Bots can have…

We study the impact of Stack Overflow code evolution on the stability of prior research findings derived from Stack Overflow data and provide recommendations for future studies. We systematically reviewed papers published between 2005--2023…

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…

There are two ways to check if a program is correct, namely execute it or review it. While executing a program is the ultimate test for its correctness reviewing the program can occur earlier in its development and find problems if done…

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…

Aim. There are 10s of thousands of code review comments each week at Meta. We developed Metamate for Code Review (MetaMateCR) that provides AI-assisted fixes for reviewer comments in production at scale. Method. We developed an internal…

Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created - and maintained - synchronously. In this paper we investigate whether production code and the accompanying tests co-evolve by…

As software projects progress, quality of code assumes paramount importance as it affects reliability, maintainability and security of software. For this reason, static analysis tools are used in developer workflows to flag code quality…

LLMs are increasingly embedded in programming workflows, from code generation to automated code review. Yet, how gendered communication styles interact with LLM-assisted programming and code review remains underexplored. We present a…

Code review is central to software engineering education but hard to scale in capstone projects due to tight deadlines, uneven peer feedback, and limited prior experience. We investigate an LLM-as-reviewer integrated directly into GitHub…

Compliance as code is an emerging idea about automating compliance through programmed compliance controls and checks. Given scant existing research thus far, the paper presents an empirical analysis of a compliance as code project…

Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…

AI code generators like OpenAI Codex have the potential to assist novice programmers by generating code from natural language descriptions, however, over-reliance might negatively impact learning and retention. To explore the implications…

Code review is a key element of quality assurance in software development. Determining the right reviewer for a given code change requires understanding the characteristics of the changed code, identifying the skills of each potential…

Technical Debt (TD) refers to the situation where developers make trade-offs to achieve short-term goals at the expense of long-term code quality, which can have a negative impact on the quality of software systems. In the context of code…