Related papers: Code Perfumes: Reporting Good Code to Encourage Le…

Code comments are important in software development because they directly influence software maintainability and overall quality. Bad practices of code comments lead to code comment smells, negatively impacting software maintenance. Recent…

Code smells and software vulnerabilities both increase maintenance cost, yet they are often handled by separate tools that miss structural context and produce noisy warnings. This paper presents The Code Whisperer, a hybrid framework that…

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…

Test smells are defined as sub-optimal design choices developers make when implementing test cases. Hence, similar to code smells, the research community has produced numerous test smell detection tools to investigate the impact of test…

Code analysis is fundamental in Software Engineering, supporting debugging, optimization, and security assessment. Human developers approach it through syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. Traditional tools are…

Code editing is an essential step towards reliable program synthesis to automatically correct critical errors generated from code LLMs. Recent studies have demonstrated that closed-source LLMs (i.e., ChatGPT and GPT-4) are capable of…

Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are an essential entry point to computer science. In order to create an effective learning environment that has the potential to address the gender imbalance in computer science, it is…

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents both challenges and opportunities for Natural Language Processing (NLP) education. This paper introduces ``Vibe Coding,'' a pedagogical approach that leverages LLMs as coding…

Learning basic programming with Scratch can be hard for novices and tutors alike: Students may not know how to advance when solving a task, teachers may face classrooms with many raised hands at a time, and the problem is exacerbated when…

Context: Code smells (CS) tend to compromise software quality and also demand more effort by developers to maintain and evolve the application throughout its life-cycle. They have long been catalogued with corresponding mitigating solutions…

With the continuous growth of the internet market, games are becoming more and more popular worldwide. However, increased market competition for game demands developers to write more efficient games in terms of performance, security, and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in automating software engineering tasks, particularly in code generation. However, current evaluation benchmarks, which primarily focus on accuracy, fall short in assessing the…

As one of the most popular dynamic languages, Python experiences a decrease in readability and maintainability when code smells are present. Recent advancements in Large Language Models have sparked growing interest in AI-enabled tools for…

Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are increasingly popular in programming education, in particular for young learners. While the use of blocks helps prevent syntax errors, semantic bugs remain common and difficult to…

In this paper, we present a novel approach to improving software quality and efficiency through a Large Language Model (LLM)-based model designed to review code and identify potential issues. Our proposed LLM-based AI agent model is trained…

Young learners are increasingly introduced to programming, and one of the main challenges for educators is to achieve learning success while also creating enthusiasm. As it is particularly difficult to achieve this enthusiasm initially in…

Introductory programming courses often emphasize mastering syntax and basic constructs before progressing to more complex and interesting programs. This bottom-up approach can be frustrating for novices, shifting the focus away from problem…

Technical debt has become a common metaphor for the accumulation of software design and implementation choices that seek fast initial gains but that are under par and counterproductive in the long run. However, as a metaphor, technical debt…

Simulation modelling systems are routinely used to test or understand real-world scenarios in a controlled setting. They have found numerous applications in scientific research, engineering, and industrial operations. Due to their complex…

Code smells are seen as major source of technical debt and, as such, should be detected and removed. However, researchers argue that the subjectiveness of the code smells detection process is a major hindrance to mitigate the problem of…