Related papers: RepliComment: Identifying Clones in Code Comments

Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is…

In this paper, we describe and present the first dataset of source code plagiarism specifically aimed at contest plagiarism. The dataset contains 251 pairs of plagiarized solutions of competitive programming tasks in Java, as well as 660…

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…

Context: Logging is an important part of modern software projects; logs are used in several tasks such as debugging and testing. Due to the complex nature of logging, it remains a difficult task with several pitfalls that could have serious…

Contemporary software documentation is as complicated as the software itself. During its lifecycle, the documentation accumulates a lot of near duplicate fragments, i.e. chunks of text that were copied from a single source and were later…

Multilingual programming, which involves using multiple programming languages (PLs) in a single project, is increasingly common due to its benefits. However, it introduces cross-language bugs (CLBs), which arise from interactions between…

Test smells indicate poor development practices in test code, reducing maintainability and reliability. While developers often struggle to prevent or refactor these issues, existing tools focus primarily on detection rather than automated…

Software developers embed logging statements inside the source code as an imperative duty in modern software development as log files are necessary for tracking down runtime system issues and troubleshooting system management tasks.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used to support software developers in tasks such as code generation, optimization, and documentation. However, their ability to improve existing programming answers in a human-like manner remains…

Deliberation is a common and natural behavior in human daily life. For example, when writing papers or articles, we usually first write drafts, and then iteratively polish them until satisfied. In light of such a human cognitive process, we…

Software developers frequently reuse source code from repositories as it saves development time and effort. Code clones accumulated in these repositories hence represent often repeated functionalities and are candidates for reuse in an…

Code reviews are popular in both industrial and open source projects. The benefits of code reviews are widely recognized and include better code quality and lower likelihood of introducing bugs. However, since code review is a manual…

In practice, developers search for related earlier bugs and their associated discussion threads when faced with a new bug to repair. Typically, these discussion threads consist of comments and even bug-fixing comments intended to capture…

Developers use logging statements to track software runtime behaviors and system status. Yet, unclear or misleading logs can hide true execution patterns and hinder software maintenance. Current research on logging statement issues is…

Context: In software development organizations employing weak or collective ownership, different teams are allowed and expected to autonomously perform changes in various components. This creates diversity both in the knowledge of, and in…

"Extract Method" refactoring is a technique for consolidating code clones. Parameterization approaches are used to extract a single method from multiple code clones that contain differences. This approach parameterizes expressions and…

Bad requirements quality can cause expensive consequences during the software development lifecycle, especially if iterations are long and feedback comes late. %-- the faster a problem is found, the cheaper it is to fix. This makes explicit…

User Interfaces (UIs) intensively rely on event-driven programming: widgets send UI events, which capture users' interactions, to dedicated objects called controllers. Controllers use several UI listeners that handle these events to produce…

Identifying and addressing security issues during the early phase of the development lifecycle is critical for mitigating the long-term negative impacts on software systems. Code review serves as an effective practice that enables…