Related papers: What Do Developers Discuss about Code Comments?

Code comments are significantly helpful in comprehending software programs and also aid developers to save a great deal of time in software maintenance. Code comment generation aims to automatically predict comments in natural language…

Comments play an important role in updating Stack Overflow (SO) posts. They are used to point out a problem (e.g., obsolete answer and buggy code) in a SO answer or ask for more details about a proposed answer. We refer to this type of…

The programming skill is one crucial ability for Large Language Models (LLMs), necessitating a deep understanding of programming languages (PLs) and their correlation with natural languages (NLs). We examine the impact of pre-training data…

An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…

Good comments help developers understand software faster and provide better maintenance. However, comments are often missing, generally inaccurate, or out of date. Many of these problems can be avoided by automatic comment generation. This…

Code review is a well-established and valued practice in the software engineering community contributing to both code quality and interpersonal benefits. However, there are challenges in both tools and processes that give rise to…

Comments within source code are essential for developers to comprehend the code's purpose and ensure its correct usage. However, as codebases evolve, maintaining an accurate alignment between the comments and the code becomes increasingly…

Technical debt (TD) describes the additional costs that emerge when developers have opted for a quick and easy solution to a problem, rather than a more effective and well-designed, but time-consuming approach. Self-Admitted Technical Debts…

Code review that detects and locates defects and other quality issues plays an important role in software quality control. One type of issue that may impact the quality of software is code smells. Yet, little is known about the extent to…

Code reviews are a critical aspect of open-source software (OSS) development, ensuring quality and fostering collaboration. This study examines perceptions, challenges, and biases in OSS code review processes, focusing on the perspectives…

Background: Despite the widespread use of automated security defect detection tools, software projects still contain many security defects that could result in serious damage. Such tools are largely context-insensitive and may not cover all…

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…

Context: Software developers are increasingly facing the challenges of writing code that is not only concurrent but also correct. Objective: To help these developers, it is necessary to understand concurrency topics they are interested in,…

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…

Academic publications have been evaluated in terms of their impact on research communities based on many metrics, such as the number of citations. On the other hand, the impact of academic publications on industry has been rarely studied.…

Context: Writing Clean Code understandable by other collaborators has become crucial to enhancing collaboration and productivity. However, very little is known regarding whether developers agree with Clean Code Principles and how they apply…

Increasingly, software developers are using a wide array of social collaborative platforms for software development and learning. In this work, we examined the similarities in developer's interests within and across GitHub and Stack…

Code review is a critical practice in modern software engineering, helping developers detect defects early, improve code quality, and facilitate knowledge sharing. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), a growing body…

We performed two online surveys of Stack Overflow answerers and visitors to assess their awareness to outdated code and software licenses in Stack Overflow answerers. The answerer survey targeted 607 highly reputed Stack Overflow users and…

Software developers experience and share a wide range of emotions throughout a rich ecosystem of communication channels. A recent trend that has emerged in empirical software engineering studies is leveraging sentiment analysis of…