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JDBC remains a key technology for database access in Java applications. Since the database dictionary and the Java type system have distinct scopes, developers inevitably need to deal with bugs in SQL-to-Java type mappings. We propose an…
Using API reference documentation like JavaDoc is an integral part of software development. Previous research introduced a grounded taxonomy that organizes API documentation knowledge in 12 types, including knowledge about the…
In software development, the identification of source code file experts is an important task. Identifying these experts helps to improve software maintenance and evolution activities, such as developing new features, code reviews, and bug…
Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…
Duplicated code has a negative impact on the quality of software systems and should be detected at least. In this paper, we discuss an approach that improves source code retrieval using the structural information about the programs. We…
This paper describes a new modelling language for the effective design of Java annotations. Since their inclusion in the 5th edition of Java, annotations have grown from a useful tool for the addition of meta-data to play a central role in…
The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…
Recent advances in automated vulnerability detection have achieved potential results in helping developers determine vulnerable components. However, after detecting vulnerabilities, investigating to fix vulnerable code is a non-trivial…
Emojis and emoticons serve as non-verbal cues and are increasingly prevalent across various platforms, including Modern Code Review. These cues often carry emotive or instructive weight for developers. Our study dives into the utility of…
One of the most time-consuming tasks for developers is the comprehension of new code bases. An effective approach to aid this process is to label source code files with meaningful annotations, which can help developers understand the…
Recently, automatic code comment generation is proposed to facilitate program comprehension. Existing code comment generation techniques focus on describing the functionality of the source code. However, there are other aspects such as…
Software vulnerabilities are a serious and crucial concern. Typically, in a program or function consisting of hundreds or thousands of source code statements, there are only a few statements causing the corresponding vulnerabilities. Most…
The success of software model checking depends on finding an appropriate abstraction of the subject program. The choice of the abstract domain and the analysis configuration is currently left to the user, who may not be familiar with the…
[Background] In large open-source software projects, development knowledge is often fragmented across multiple artefacts and contributors such that individual stakeholders are generally unaware of the full breadth of the product features.…
Commit messages are valuable resources for describing why code changes are committed to repositories in version control systems (e.g., Git). They effectively help developers understand code changes and better perform software maintenance…
Context: In collaborative software development, the peer code review process proves beneficial only when the reviewers provide useful comments. Objective: This paper investigates the usefulness of Code Review Comments (CR comments) through…
Dynamically typed programming languages such as Python and JavaScript defer type checking to run time. VM implementations can improve performance by eliminating redundant dynamic type checks. However, type inference analyses are often…
The performance of text classification has improved tremendously using intelligently engineered neural-based models, especially those injecting categorical metadata as additional information, e.g., using user/product information for…
There are often multiple ways to implement the same requirement in source code. Different implementation choices can result in code snippets that are similar, and have been defined in multiple ways: code clones, examples, simions and…
Code comment generation is a crucial task in the field of automatic software development. Most previous neural comment generation systems used an encoder-decoder neural network and encoded only information from source code as input.…