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Since perception tests are highly time-consuming, there is a need to automate as many operations as possible, such as stimulus generation, procedure control, perception testing, and data analysis. The computer-driven system we are…

Background: Research software plays an important role in solving real-life problems, empowering scientific innovations, and handling emergency situations. Therefore, the correctness and trustworthiness of research software are of absolute…

This paper reports on the challenges and lessons we learned while running controlled experiments in crowdsourcing platforms. Crowdsourcing is becoming an attractive technique to engage a diverse and large pool of subjects in experimental…

Background: Developers spend a lot of their time on understanding source code. Static code analysis tools can draw attention to code that is difficult for developers to understand. However, most of the findings are based on non-validated…

Static code analysis tools and integrated development environments present developers with quality-related software metrics, some of which describe the understandability of source code. Software metrics influence overarching strategic…

Some approaches to increasing program reliability involve a disciplined use of programming languages so as to minimise the hazards introduced by error-prone features. This is realised by writing code that is constrained to a subset of the a…

Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…

While teaching introductory programming courses for over a decade in reputed institutions we have experienced that several factors play significant role in developing problem solving skills and program development skills in students. There…

Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…

Background: During software maintenance and development, the comprehension of program code is key to success. High-quality comments can help us better understand programs, but they're often missing or outmoded in today's programs. Automatic…

Qualitative data analysis provides insight into the underlying perceptions and experiences within unstructured data. However, the time-consuming nature of the coding process, especially for larger datasets, calls for innovative approaches,…

Code review is a widely-used practice in software development companies to identify defects. Hence, code review has been included in many software engineering curricula at universities worldwide. However, teaching code review is still a…

Searching for clues, gathering evidence, and reviewing case files are all techniques used by criminal investigators to draw sound conclusions and avoid wrongful convictions. Similarly, in software engineering (SE) research, we can develop…

We asked students to explain the structure and execution of their small programs after they had submitted them to a programming exercise. These questions about learner's code (QLCs) were delivered at three occasions in an online and open…

Literature and intuition suggest that a developer's intelligence and personality have an impact on their performance in comprehending source code. Researchers made this suggestion in the past when discussing threats to validity of their…

Understanding binary code is an essential but complex software engineering task for reverse engineering, malware analysis, and compiler optimization. Unlike source code, binary code has limited semantic information, which makes it…

The immense amounts of source code provide ample challenges and opportunities during software development. To handle the size of code bases, developers commonly search for code, e.g., when trying to find where a particular feature is…

Machine learning models trained on code and related artifacts offer valuable support for software maintenance but suffer from interpretability issues due to their complex internal variables. These concerns are particularly significant in…

It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code written in a…

Nowadays, Computer Science tightly entered all spheres of human activity. To improve quality and speed of development process, it is important to help programmers improve their working conditions. This paper proposes a vision on exploring…