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Developing software with the source code open to the public is prevalent; however, similar to its closed counter part, open-source has quality problems, which cause functional failures, such as program breakdowns, and non-functional, such…
We present a study that characterizes the way developers use automatically generated patches when fixing software defects. Our study tasked two groups of developers with repairing defects in C programs. Both groups were provided with the…
Real software, the kind working programmers produce by the kLOC to solve real-world problems, tends to be "natural", like speech or natural language; it tends to be highly repetitive and predictable. Researchers have captured this…
Bugs that persist into releases of video games can have negative impacts on both developers and users, but particular aspects of testing in game development can lead to difficulties in effectively catching these missed bugs. It has become…
Multiple approaches have been proposed to automatically recommend potential developers who can address bug reports. These approaches are typically designed to work for any bug report submitted to any software project. However, we conjecture…
This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…
Bugs that are detected earlier during the development lifecycle are easier and cheaper to fix, whereas bugs that are found during production are difficult and expensive to address, and may have dire consequences. Type systems are…
In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…
Code clones are code snippets that are identical or similar to other snippets within the same or different files. They are often created through copy-and-paste practices during development and maintenance activities. Since code clones may…
Large language models are increasingly used for code generation and debugging, but their outputs can still contain bugs, that originate from training data. Distinguishing whether an LLM prefers correct code, or a familiar incorrect version…
We introduce a simple microscopic description of software bug dynamics where users, programmers and a maintainer interact through a given program, with a particular emphasis on bug creation, detection and fixing. When the program is written…
[This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to updated research available on arXiv (arXiv:1811.01918)] As the modern open-source paradigm makes it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these…
In issue tracking systems, each bug is assigned a priority level (e.g., Blocker, Critical, Major, Minor, or Trivial in JIRA from highest to lowest), which indicates the urgency level of the bug. In this sense, understanding bug priority…
Software source code often harbours "hotspots": small portions of the code that change far more often than the rest of the project and thus concentrate maintenance activity. We mine the complete version histories of 91 evolving, actively…
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…
In software development, developers frequently apply maintenance activities to the source code that change a few lines by a single commit. A good understanding of the characteristics of such small changes can support quality assurance…
High-quality and large-scale repositories of real bugs and their concise patches collected from real-world applications are critical for research in software engineering community. In such a repository, each real bug is explicitly…
Developers often use crash reports to understand the root cause of bugs. However, locating the buggy source code snippet from such information is a challenging task, mainly when the log database contains many crash reports. To mitigate this…
Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…
With the advance in quantum computing in recent years, quantum software becomes vital for exploring the full potential of quantum computing systems. Quantum programming is different from classical programming, for example, the state of a…