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Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query.…

We propose a novel approach to program synthesis, focusing on synthesizing database queries. At a high level, our proposed algorithm takes as input a sketch with soft constraints encoding user intent, and then iteratively interacts with the…

Natural language processing has improved tremendously after the success of word embedding techniques such as word2vec. Recently, the same idea has been applied on source code with encouraging results. In this survey, we aim to collect and…

Tools for rewriting, refactoring and optimizing code should be fast and correct. Large language models (LLMs), by their nature, possess neither of these qualities. Yet, there remains tremendous opportunity in using LLMs to improve code. We…

Code generation tasks aim to automate the conversion of user requirements into executable code, significantly reducing manual development efforts and enhancing software productivity. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has…

Docker, the industry standard for packaging and deploying applications, leverages Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to facilitate the creation of images through Dockerfiles. However, maintaining Dockerfiles presents significant…

Some approaches to increasing program reliability involve a disciplined use of programming languages so as to minimise the hazards introduced by error-prone features. This is realised by writing code that is constrained to a subset of the a…

Like software, requirements evolve and change frequently during the development process. Refactoring is the process of reorganising software without changing its behaviour, to make it easier to understand and modify. We propose refactoring…

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…

Automated software verification is a very active field of research which has made enormous progress both in theoretical and practical aspects. Recently, an important amount of research effort has been put into applying these techniques on…

In this paper we describe how to leverage higher-order unification to type check a dependently typed language with meta-variables. The literature usually presents the unification algorithm as a standalone component, however the need to…

To remain useful for their users, software systems need to continuously enhance and extend their functionality. Nevertheless, in many object-oriented applications, features are not represented explicitly. The lack of modularization is known…

This study aims to enhance the maintainability of code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), with a focus on the Python programming language. As the use of LLMs for coding assistance grows, so do concerns about the maintainability of…

Erasure coding techniques are getting integrated in networked distributed storage systems as a way to provide fault-tolerance at the cost of less storage overhead than traditional replication. Redundancy is maintained over time through…

The expansion of the open source community and the rise of large language models have raised ethical and security concerns on the distribution of source code, such as misconduct on copyrighted code, distributions without proper licenses, or…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Many students in introductory programming courses fare poorly in the code writing tasks of the final summative assessment. Such tasks are designed to assess whether novices have developed the analytical skills to translate from the given…

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…

We introduce the concept of code shaping, an interaction paradigm for editing code using free-form sketch annotations directly on top of the code and console output. To evaluate this concept, we conducted a three-stage design study with 18…

Code search has usually been evaluated as first-stage retrieval, even though production systems rely on broader pipelines with reranking and developer-style queries. Existing benchmarks also suffer from data contamination, label noise, and…