Related papers: RAID: Tool Support for Refactoring-Aware Code Revi…
Agentic coding tools, such as OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, are transforming the software engineering landscape. These AI-powered systems function as autonomous teammates capable of planning and executing complex development tasks.…
We present the Code Documentation and Analysis Tool (CoDAT). CoDAT is a tool designed to maintain consistency between the various levels of code documentation, e.g. if a line in a code sketch is changed, the comment that documents the…
Code differencing is a fundamental technique in software engineering practice and research. While researchers have proposed text-based differencing techniques capable of identifying line changes over the past decade, existing methods…
Developers use tools such as GitHub pull requests to review code, discuss proposed changes, and request modifications. While changed files are commonly presented in alphabetical order, this does not necessarily coincide with the reviewer's…
The causes of the reproducibility crisis include lack of standardization and transparency in scientific reporting. Checklists such as ARRIVE and CONSORT seek to improve transparency, but they are not always followed by authors and peer…
While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for program synthesis, they lack the global view needed to develop useful abstractions; they generally predict programs one at a time, often repeating the same functionality.…
We study leveraging adaptive retrieval to ensure sufficient "bridge" documents are retrieved for reasoning-intensive retrieval. Bridge documents are those that contribute to the reasoning process yet are not directly relevant to the initial…
We describe a replacement for RAID 6, based on a new linear, systematic code, which detects and corrects any combination of $E$ errors (unknown location) and $Z$ erasures (known location) provided that $Z+2E \leq 4$. We investigate some…
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…
Literature reviews are essential for any researcher trying to keep up to date with the burgeoning software engineering literature. FAST$^2$ is a novel tool for reducing the effort required for conducting literature reviews by assisting the…
Despite the popularity and importance of modern code review, the understanding of the cognitive processes that enable reviewers to analyze code and provide meaningful feedback is lacking. To address this gap, we observed and interviewed ten…
Modern Code Review (MCR) is a standard in all kinds of organizations that develop software. MCR pays for itself through perceived and proven benefits in quality assurance and knowledge transfer. However, the time invest in MCR is generally…
Context: Contemporary code review tools are a popular choice for software quality assurance. Using these tools, reviewers are able to post a linkage between two patches during a review discussion. Large development teams that use a…
Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the…
Code refinement aims to enhance existing code by addressing issues, refactoring, and optimizing to improve quality and meet specific requirements. As software projects scale in size and complexity, the traditional iterative exchange between…
Background: Code review, a core practice in software engineering, has been widely studied as a collaborative process, with prior work suggesting it functions as a communication network. However, this theory remains untested, limiting its…
Cognitive biases appear during code review. They significantly impact the creation of feedback and how it is interpreted by developers. These biases can lead to illogical reasoning and decision-making, violating one of the main hypotheses…
Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) is an effective retrieval-augmented language model applied across a variety of open-domain tasks, such as question answering, fact checking, etc. In FiD, supporting passages are first retrieved and then processed…
AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective for knowledge-intensive tasks, but is widely believed to offer limited benefit for reasoning-intensive problems such as math and code generation. We challenge this assumption by…