Related papers: Do Comments follow Commenting Conventions? A Case …

By bringing together code, text, and examples, Jupyter notebooks have become one of the most popular means to produce scientific results in a productive and reproducible way. As many of the notebook authors are experts in their scientific…

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 However, comments are often missing, generally inaccurate, or out of date.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…

Modern code review is a process in which an incremental code contribution made by a code author is reviewed by one or more peers before it is committed to the version control system. An important element of modern code review is verifying…

The relationship of comments to code, and in particular, the task of generating useful comments given the code, has long been of interest. The earliest approaches have been based on strong syntactic theories of comment-structures, and…

Software systems are designed according to guidelines and constraints defined by business rules. Some of these constraints define the allowable or required values for data handled by the systems. These data constraints usually originate…

Ensuring semantic consistency between source code and its accompanying comments is crucial for program comprehension, effective debugging, and long-term maintainability. Comment inconsistency arises when developers modify code but neglect…

Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…

Primitive types are fundamental components available in any programming language, which serve as the building blocks of data manipulation. Understanding the role of these types in source code is essential to write software. Little work has…

Code search engines usually use readability feature to rank code snippets. There are several metrics to calculate this feature, but developers may have different perceptions about readability. Correlation between readability and…

Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…

Context: Code reviews are essential for maintaining software quality, yet many human review comments suffer from issues such as redundancy, vagueness, or lack of constructiveness. These types of comments may slow down feedback and obscure…

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

Background: Code cloning - copying and reusing pieces of source code - is a common phenomenon in software development in practice. There have been several empirical studies on the effects of cloning, but there are contradictory results…

Nowadays, modern applications are developed using components written in different programming languages. These systems introduce several advantages. However, as the number of languages increases, so does the challenges related to the…

Code review is a crucial practice in software development. As code review nowadays is lightweight, various issues can be identified, and sometimes, they can be trivial. Research has investigated automated approaches to classify review…

Statically-annotated types have been shown to aid developers in a number of programming tasks, and this benefit holds true even when static type checking is not used. It is hypothesized that this is because developers use type annotations…

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…

Comments, or natural language descriptions of source code, are standard practice among software developers. By communicating important aspects of the code such as functionality and usage, comments help with software project maintenance.…

Software developers often look for solutions to their code-level problems using the Stack Overflow Q&A website. To receive help, developers frequently submit questions containing sample code segments and the description of the programming…

Source Code Summarization is the task of writing short, natural language descriptions of source code. The main use for these descriptions is in software documentation e.g. the one-sentence Java method descriptions in JavaDocs. Code…