Related papers: Edit-Run Behavior in Programming and Debugging

During the life cycle of software development, developers have to fix different kinds of bugs reported by testers or end users. The efficiency and effectiveness of fixing bugs have a huge impact on the reliability of the software as well as…

In seeking to understand the processes enacted during software development, an increasing number of studies have mined software repositories. In particular, studies have endeavored to show how teams resolve software defects. Although much…

Debugging is a relevant task for finding bugs during software development, maintenance, and evolution. During debugging, developers use modern IDE debuggers to analyze variables, step execution, and set breakpoints. Observing IDE debuggers,…

Decision-making is a key software engineering skill. Developers constantly make choices throughout the software development process, from requirements to implementation. While prior work has studied developer decision-making, the choices…

Developers often insert temporary "print" or "log" instructions into their code to help them better understand runtime behavior, usually when the code is not behaving as they expected. Despite the fact that such monitoring instructions, or…

Software projects are regularly updated with new functionality and bug fixes through so-called releases. In recent years, many software projects have been shifting to shorter release cycles and this can affect the bug handling activity.…

One of the main challenges that developers face when testing their systems lies in engineering test cases that are good enough to reveal bugs. And while our body of knowledge on software testing and automated test case generation is already…

Human error research on overconfidence supports the benefits of early visibility of defects and disciplined development. If risk to the enterprise is to be reduced, individuals need to become aware of the reality of the quality of their…

We examine "vibe coding": an emerging programming paradigm where developers primarily write code by interacting with code-generating large language models rather than writing code directly. We present the first empirical study of vibe…

Modern programming languages, such as Python, support language features from several paradigms, such as object-oriented, procedural, and functional. Research has shown that code written in some paradigms can be harder to comprehend, but to…

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…

Providing effective feedback for programming assignments in computer science education can be challenging: students solve problems by iteratively submitting code, executing it, and using limited feedback from the compiler or the auto-grader…

Dependency cycles pose a significant challenge to software quality and maintainability. However, there is limited understanding of how practitioners resolve dependency cycles in real-world scenarios. This paper presents an empirical study…

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…

When a developer is writing code they are usually focused and in a state-of-mind which some refer to as flow. Breaking out of this flow can cause the developer to lose their train of thought and have to start their thought process from the…

Fault localization is a fundamental aspect of debugging, aiming to identify code regions likely responsible for failures. Traditional techniques primarily correlate statement execution with failures, yet program behavior is influenced by…

To detect and fix bugs and security vulnerabilities, software companies use static analysis as part of the development process. However, static analysis code itself is also prone to bugs. To ensure a consistent level of precision, as…

Defect Prevention is the most critical but most neglected component of the software quality assurance in any project. If applied at all stages of software development, it can reduce the time, cost and resources required to engineer a high…

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far,…