Related papers: Towards a Model to Appraise and Suggest Identifier…

Redundant code is a persistent challenge in software development that makes systems harder to maintain, scale, and update. It adds unnecessary complexity, hinders bug fixes, and increases technical debt. Despite their impact, removing…

Recommender systems are a valuable tool for software engineers. For example, they can provide developers with a ranked list of files likely to contain a bug, or multiple auto-complete suggestions for a given method stub. However, the way…

Context: Performance regressions negatively impact execution time and memory usage of software systems. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic methods to evaluate the effectiveness of performance test suites. Performance mutation…

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…

Decisions on which classes to refactor are fraught with difficulty. The problem of identifying candidate classes becomes acute when confronted with large systems comprising hundreds or thousands of classes. In this paper, we describe a…

We aim to explore how developers document their refactoring activities during the software life cycle. We call such activity Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR), which indicates developers' documentation of their refactoring activities. SAR is…

Generative artificial intelligence attracts significant attention, especially with the introduction of large language models. Its capabilities are being exploited to solve various software engineering tasks. Thanks to their ability to…

Source code processing heavily relies on the methods widely used in natural language processing (NLP), but involves specifics that need to be taken into account to achieve higher quality. An example of this specificity is that the semantics…

In this paper, we address the problem of giving names to predicates in logic rules using Large Language Models (LLMs). In the context of Inductive Logic Programming, various rule generation methods produce rules containing unnamed…

Generative AI enables rapid ``vibe coding," where natural language prompts yield working software systems. While this lowers barriers to software creation, it also collapses the boundary between prototypes and engineered software, leading…

Code review is essential for maintaining software quality but often time-consuming and cognitively demanding, especially in industrial environments. Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have opened new avenues for automating core…

Concise and meaningful method names are crucial for program comprehension and maintenance. However, method names may become inconsistent with their corresponding implementations, causing confusion and errors. Several deep learning…

A smell in software source code denotes an indication of suboptimal design and implementation decisions, potentially hindering the code understanding and, in turn, raising the likelihood of being prone to changes and faults. Identifying…

Refactoring is the art of improving the design of a system without altering its external behavior. Refactoring has become a well established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research…

Names are deeply tied to human identity. They can serve as markers of individuality, cultural heritage, and personal history. However, using names as a core indicator of identity can lead to over-simplification of complex identities. When…

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…

Bug localization refers to the identification of source code files which is in a programming language and also responsible for the unexpected behavior of software using the bug report, which is a natural language. As bug localization is…

Deep learning and language models are increasingly dominating automated program repair research. While previous generate-and-validate approaches were able to find and use fix ingredients on a file or even project level, neural language…

Data generation and analysis is a fundamental aspect of many industries and disciplines, from strategic decision making in business to research in the physical and social sciences. However, data generated using software and algorithms can…

Incremental dialogue model components produce a sequence of output prefixes based on incoming input. Mistakes can occur due to local ambiguities or to wrong hypotheses, making the ability to revise past outputs a desirable property that can…