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Documenting the functionality of software units with code comments, e.g., Javadoc comments, is a common programmer best-practice in software engineering. This paper introduces a novel test generation technique that exploits the code-comment…
This paper presents a case study to examine the affinity of the code review process among young developers in an academic setting. Code review is indispensable considering the positive outcomes it generates. However, it is not an individual…
Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…
Large language model (LLM)-powered code review automation tools have been introduced to generate code review comments. However, not all generated comments will drive code changes. Understanding what types of generated review comments are…
Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…
Recently, automatic code comment generation is proposed to facilitate program comprehension. Existing code comment generation techniques focus on describing the functionality of the source code. However, there are other aspects such as…
Change-based code review is used widely in industrial software development. Thus, research on tools that help the reviewer to achieve better review performance can have a high impact. We analyze one possibility to provide cognitive support…
Perhaps the most widely used form of code documentation is function header comments. We performed a large-scale survey of 367 developers to catalog their expectations from such documentation and to chronicle actual practice. Paradoxically,…
Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…
Code comments play a prominent role in program comprehension activities. However, source code is not always documented and code and comments not always co-evolve. To deal with these issues, researchers have proposed techniques to…
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…
Developers use tools such as GitHub pull requests to review code, discuss proposed changes, and request modifications. While changed files are commonly presented in alphabetical order, this does not necessarily coincide with the reviewer's…
Code review is an important practice in software development, yet it is time-consuming and requires substantial effort. While open-source datasets have been used to train neural models for automating code review tasks, including review…
The automation of code review has been tackled by several researchers with the goal of reducing its cost. The adoption of deep learning in software engineering pushed the automation to new boundaries, with techniques imitating developers in…
Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly integrated into software engineering and maintenance tasks due to their high performance with software engineering tasks and robust understanding of modern programming languages. However,…
Many industrial IT security standards and policies mandate the usage of a secure coding methodology in the software development process. This implies two different aspects: first, secure coding must be based on a set of secure coding…
Is the quality of existing code correlated with the quality of subsequent changes? According to the (controversial) broken windows theory, which inspired this study, disorder sets descriptive norms and signals behavior that further…
In software engineering, it is not enough to simply write code that only works as intended, even if it is free from vulnerabilities and bugs. Every programming language has a style guide and a set of best practices defined by its community,…
Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…
Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…