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Commit messages (CMs) are an essential part of version control. By providing important context in regard to what has changed and why, they strongly support software maintenance and evolution. But writing good CMs is difficult and often…

In the current IT world, developers write code while system operators run the code mostly as a black box. The connection between both worlds is typically established with log messages: the developer provides hints to the (unknown) operator,…

An eye-tracking study of 18 developers reading and summarizing Java methods is presented. The developers provide a written summary for methods assigned to them. In total, 63 methods are used from five different systems. Previous studies on…

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…

Appropriate comments of code snippets provide insight for code functionality, which are helpful for program comprehension. However, due to the great cost of authoring with the comments, many code projects do not contain adequate comments.…

Code review is a widely-used practice in software development companies to identify defects. Hence, code review has been included in many software engineering curricula at universities worldwide. However, teaching code review is still a…

Statistical analysis is the tool of choice to turn data into information, and then information into empirical knowledge. To be valid, the process that goes from data to knowledge should be supported by detailed, rigorous guidelines, which…

Real-world programs are neither monolithic nor static -- they are constructed using platform and third party libraries, and both programs and libraries continuously evolve in response to change pressure. In case of the Java language, rules…

Code comments are important for developers in program comprehension. In scenarios of comprehending and reusing a method, developers expect code comments to provide supplementary information beyond the method signature. However, the extent…

Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It aims at automatically predicting the next tokens or lines that the programmers tend to use. A good code completion tool can…

Unit tests are widely used to check source code quality, but they can be too coarse-grained or ill-suited for testing individual program statements. We introduce inline tests to make it easier to check for faults in statements. We motivate…

This paper describes an approach to improve code comments along different quality axes by rewriting those comments with customized Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based tools. We conduct an empirical study followed by grounded theory…

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…

The problem of writing a specification which accurately reflects the intent of the developer has long been recognized as fundamental. We propose a method and a supporting tool to write and check a specification and an implementation using a…

Context. Source code refactoring is a well-established approach to improving source code quality without compromising its external behavior. Motivation. The literature described the benefits of refactoring, yet its application in practice…

Code comment generation aims at generating natural language descriptions for a code snippet to facilitate developers' program comprehension activities. Despite being studied for a long time, a bottleneck for existing approaches is that…

As a software system evolves, its architecture tends to degrade, and gradually impedes software maintenance and evolution activities and negatively impacts the quality attributes of the system. The main root cause behind architecture…

As a YouTube channel grows, each video can potentially collect enormous amounts of comments that provide direct feedback from the viewers. These comments are a major means of understanding viewer expectations and improving channel…

This paper investigates how the speed of code review is affected by the code quality, activity and usage in the context of MediaWiki extensions. The median time to merge is compared against several other variables which are collected using…

Code refinement aims to enhance existing code by addressing issues, refactoring, and optimizing to improve quality and meet specific requirements. As software projects scale in size and complexity, the traditional iterative exchange between…