Related papers: COSPEX: A Program Comprehension Tool for Novice Pr…

While program comprehension tools often use static program analysis techniques to obtain useful information, they usually work only with sufficiently scalable techniques with limited precision. A possible improvement of this approach is to…

Code summarization has emerged as a fundamental technique in the field of program comprehension. While code language models have shown significant advancements, the current models and benchmarks are confined to high-readability code, which…

A code summary is a brief natural language description of source code. Summaries are usually only a single sentence long, and yet form the backbone of developer documentation. A short descriptions such as "changes all visible polygons to…

Source code summarization -- creating natural language descriptions of source code behavior -- is a rapidly-growing research topic with applications to automatic documentation generation, program comprehension, and software maintenance.…

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…

Analyzing programs with loops is a challenging task, suffering from potential issues such as indeterminate number of iterations and exponential growth of control flow complexity. Loop summarization, as a static analysis method for concrete…

A source code summary of a subroutine is a brief description of that subroutine. Summaries underpin a majority of documentation consumed by programmers, such as the method summaries in JavaDocs. Source code summarization is the task of…

Reading, understanding and explaining code have traditionally been important skills for novices learning programming. As large language models (LLMs) become prevalent, these foundational skills are more important than ever given the…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain in popularity, it is important to understand how novice programmers use them. We present a thematic analysis of 33 learners, aged 10-17, independently learning Python through 45 code-authoring tasks…

Automatic text summarisation has drawn considerable interest in the area of software engineering. It is challenging to summarise the activities related to a software project, (1) because of the volume and heterogeneity of involved software…

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced a new paradigm for software development, where source code is generated from natural language prompts. While this paradigm significantly boosts development productivity,…

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…

Source code summarization is the task of creating short, natural language descriptions of source code. Code summarization is the backbone of much software documentation such as JavaDocs, in which very brief comments such as "adds the…

Executing code is essential for various program analysis tasks, e.g., to detect bugs that manifest through exceptions or to obtain execution traces for further dynamic analysis. However, executing an arbitrary piece of code is often…

To support software developers in understanding and maintaining programs, various automatic (source) code summarization techniques have been proposed to generate a concise natural language summary (i.e., comment) for a given code snippet.…

Source code summarization is the task of writing natural language descriptions of source code. A typical use case is generating short summaries of subroutines for use in API documentation. The heart of almost all current research into code…

Current abstractive summarization models either suffer from a lack of clear interpretability or provide incomplete rationales by only highlighting parts of the source document. To this end, we propose the Summarization Program (SP), an…

Coding agents produce rich trajectories while solving software-engineering tasks. To enable agent self-evolution, these trajectories can be distilled into reusable procedural skills that compactly encode experience to guide future behavior.…

Several code summarization techniques have been proposed in the literature to automatically document a code snippet or a function. Ideally, software developers should be involved in assessing the quality of the generated summaries. However,…

Context: Various approaches aim to support program comprehension by automatically detecting algorithms in source code. However, no empirical evaluations of their helpfulness have been performed. Objective: To empirically evaluate how…