Related papers: An Empirical Study on Refactoring-Inducing Pull Re…

The risk to using third-party libraries in a software application is that much needed maintenance is solely carried out by library maintainers. These libraries may rely on a core team of maintainers (who might be a single maintainer that is…

As AI coding agents evolve from autocomplete tools to autonomous "AI workforce" teammates, they introduce a critical new bottleneck: human maintainers must now manage complex interaction loops rather than just reviewing code. Analyzing…

Software projects frequently use automation tools to perform repetitive activities in the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated workflows for software projects.…

Code review is an essential part to software development lifecycle since it aims at guaranteeing the quality of codes. Modern code review activities necessitate developers viewing, understanding and even running the programs to assess…

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…

Background: Test-driven development (TDD) is a technique that repeats short coding cycles interleaved with testing. The developer first writes a unit test for the desired functionality, followed by the necessary production code, and…

[Background] Refactoring has matured over the past twenty years to become part of a developer's toolkit. However, many fundamental research questions still remain largely unexplored. [Aim] The goal of this paper is to investigate the…

Effective peer code review in collaborative software development necessitates useful reviewer comments and supportive automated tools. Code review comments are a central component of the Modern Code Review process in the industry and…

This Innovative Practice full paper explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance the teaching of code refactoring in software engineering courses through real-time, context-aware feedback. Refactoring improves code quality but is…

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…

AI coding agents are now submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, acting not just as assistants but as autonomous contributors. As these agentic contributions are rapidly increasing across real repositories, little is known…

Modern Code Review (MCR) is a standard practice in software engineering, yet it demands substantial time and resource investments. Recent research has increasingly explored automating core review tasks using machine learning (ML) and deep…

Software development agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Agent, Devin, and OpenAI Codex are being increasingly integrated into developer workflows. While prior work has evaluated agent capabilities for code completion and…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained prominence in the field of software development, significantly boosting productivity and simplifying teamwork. Although prior studies have examined task-specific applications, the…

Commits often involve refactorings -- behavior-preserving code modifications aiming at software design improvements. Refactoring operations pose a challenge to code reviewers, as distinguishing them from behavior-altering changes is often…

Automated program repair (APR) tools have unlocked the potential for the rapid rectification of codebase issues. However, to encourage wider adoption of program repair in practice, it is necessary to address the usability concerns related…

Code review is a popular practice where developers critique each others' changes. Since automated builds can identify low-level issues (e.g., syntactic errors, regression bugs), it is not uncommon for software organizations to incorporate…

With the ever increasing number of filed patent applications every year, the need for effective and efficient systems for managing such tremendous amounts of data becomes inevitably important. Patent Retrieval (PR) is considered the pillar…

A central function of code review is to increase understanding; helping reviewers understand a code change aids in knowledge transfer and finding bugs. Comments in code largely serve a similar purpose, helping future readers understand the…

Background: Contemporary software development organizations lack diversity and the ratios of women in Free and open-source software (FOSS) communities are even lower than the industry average. Although the results of recent studies hint the…