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AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kexin Sun , Hongyu Kuang , Sebastian Baltes , Xin Zhou , He Zhang , Xiaoxing Ma , Guoping Rong , Dong Shao , Christoph Treude

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-13 Matúš Sulír , Milan Nosáľ , Jaroslav Porubän

Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Xiaofeng Han , Amjed Tahir , Peng Liang , Steve Counsell , Yajing Luo

Context: In the realm of software development, maintaining high software quality is a persistent challenge. However, this challenge is often impeded by the lack of comprehensive understanding of how specific code modifications influence…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Thomas Karanikiotis , Andreas L. Symeonidis

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni , Marouane Kessentini

Comments are very useful to the flow of code development. With the increasing commonality of code, novice coders have been creating a significant amount of codebases. Due to lack of commenting standards, their comments are often useless,…

The software development community has been using code quality metrics for the last five decades. Despite their wide adoption, code quality metrics have attracted a fair share of criticism. In this paper, first, we carry out a qualitative…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Tushar Sharma , Diomidis Spinellis

Large Language Models are essential coding assistants, yet their training is predominantly English-centric. In this study, we evaluate the performance of code language models in non-English contexts, identifying challenges in their adoption…

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Xiaofeng Han , Amjed Tahir , Peng Liang , Steve Counsell , Kelly Blincoe , Bing Li , Yajing Luo

Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity among software engineers. A crucial aspect of developing effective code generation LLMs is to evaluate these models using a robust benchmark. Evaluation benchmarks with quality issues can…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Mohammed Latif Siddiq , Simantika Dristi , Joy Saha , Joanna C. S. Santos

This paper investigates the quality of source code comments automatically generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). While AI-based comment generation has emerged as a promising solution to reduce developers' documentation effort, prior…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ian Guelman , Arthur Gregório Leal , Laerte Xavier , Marco Tulio Valente

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Luana Martins , Valeria Pontillo , Heitor Costa , Filomena Ferrucci , Fabio Palomba , Ivan Machado

This paper describes the results of a large (+1100 responses) survey of professional software developers concerning standards for naming source code methods. The various standards for source code method names are derived from and supported…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Reem S. AlSuhaibani , Christian D. Newman , Michael J. Decker , Michael L. Collard , Jonathan I. Maletic

This research paper aims to find, analyze and understand code patterns in any software system and measure its quality by defining standards and proposing a formula for the same. Every code that is written can be divided into different code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2011-07-01 Jitesh Dundas

Although peer code review is widely adopted in both commercial and open source development, existing studies suggest that such code reviews often contain a significant amount of non-useful review comments. Unfortunately, to date, no tools…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-13 Mohammad Masudur Rahman , Chanchal K. Roy , Raula G. Kula

Method-level comments are critical for improving code comprehension and supporting software maintenance. With advancements in large language models (LLMs), automated comment generation has become a major research focus. However, existing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Md Mustakim Billah , Md Shamimur Rahman , Banani Roy

GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Abir Bouraffa , Yen Dieu Pham , Walid Maalej

Context: Due to the association of significant efforts, even a minor improvement in the effectiveness of Code Reviews(CR) can incur significant savings for a software development organization. Aim: This study aims to develop a finer grain…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Asif Kamal Turzo , Amiangshu Bosu

Existing automatic code comment generators mainly focus on producing a general description of functionality for a given code snippet without considering developer intentions. However, in real-world practice, comments are complicated, which…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Fangwen Mu , Xiao Chen , Lin Shi , Song Wang , Qing Wang

Code Review plays a crucial role in software quality, by allowing reviewers to discuss and critique any new patches before they can be successfully integrated into the project code. Yet, it is unsure the extent to which coding pattern…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Panyawut Sri-iesaranusorn , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Takashi Ishio