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

While programming is one of the most broadly applicable skills in modern society, modern machine learning models still cannot code solutions to basic problems. Despite its importance, there has been surprisingly little work on evaluating…

Norms are behavioral expectations in communities. Online communities are also expected to abide by the rules and regulations that are expressed in the code of conduct of a system. Even though community authorities continuously prompt their…

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…

Context: Software code review aims to early find code anomalies and to perform code improvements when they are less expensive. However, issues and challenges faced by developers who do not apply code review practices regularly are unclear.…

In recent years, Jupyter notebooks have grown in popularity in several domains of software engineering, such as data science, machine learning, and computer science education. Their popularity has to do with their rich features for…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…

Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…

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…

Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up…

The surge of research on fake news and misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election has led to a significant increase in publicly available source code repositories. Our study aims to systematically analyze and evaluate the most…

Coding standards and good practices are fundamental to a disciplined approach to software projects, whatever programming languages they employ. Prolog programming can benefit from such an approach, perhaps more than programming in other…

Recent studies have largely investigated the detection of class design anomalies. They proposed a large set of metrics that help in detecting those anomalies and in predicting the quality of class design. While those studies and the…

The code review comment (CRC) is pivotal in the process of modern code review. It provides reviewers with the opportunity to identify potential bugs, offer constructive feedback, and suggest improvements. Clear and concise code review…

During code reviews, an essential step in software quality assurance, reviewers have the difficult task of understanding and evaluating code changes to validate their quality and prevent introducing faults to the codebase. This is a tedious…

Code clones are code snippets that are identical or similar to other snippets within the same or different files. They are often created through copy-and-paste practices during development and maintenance activities. Since code clones may…

Code review is a vital but demanding aspect of software development, generating significant interest in automating review comments. Traditional evaluation methods for these comments, primarily based on text similarity, face two major…

To ensure the quality of software systems, software engineers can make use of a variety of quality assurance approaches, such as software testing, modern code review, automated static analysis, and build automation. Each of these quality…

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…