Related papers: Recommending Code Understandability Improvements b…

A key part of learning to program is learning to understand programming error messages. They can be hard to interpret and identifying the cause of errors can be time-consuming. One factor in this challenge is that the messages are typically…

In code review, generating structured and relevant comments is crucial for identifying code issues and facilitating accurate code changes that ensure an efficient code review process. Well-crafted comments not only streamline the code…

In software development, the identification of source code file experts is an important task. Identifying these experts helps to improve software maintenance and evolution activities, such as developing new features, code reviews, and bug…

Public Code Review (PCR) is developed in the Software Question Answering (SQA) community, assisting developers in exploring high-quality and efficient review services. Current methods on PCR mainly focus on the reviewer's perspective,…

In today's legal environment, lawsuits and regulatory investigations require companies to embark upon increasingly intensive data-focused engagements to identify, collect and analyze large quantities of data. When documents are staged for…

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the…

Code review is an important practice in software development, yet it is time-consuming and requires substantial effort. While open-source datasets have been used to train neural models for automating code review tasks, including review…

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…

Code intelligence is an emerging domain in software engineering, aiming to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of various code-related tasks. Recent research suggests that incorporating contextual information beyond the basic original…

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…

While code large language models have demonstrated remarkable progress in code generation, the generated code often exhibits poor runtime efficiency, limiting its practical application in performance-sensitive scenarios. To address this…

Interpreting regulatory documents or building codes into computer-processable formats is essential for the intelligent design and construction of buildings and infrastructures. Although automated rule interpretation (ARI) methods have been…

Code comments are important for program comprehension, development, and maintenance tasks. Given the varying standards for code comments, and their unstructured or semi-structured nature, developers get easily confused (especially novice…

This paper offers a new perspective on the limits of machine learning: the ceiling on progress is set not by model size or algorithm choice but by the information structure of the task itself. Code generation has progressed more reliably…

In modern software development, developers frequently need to understand code behavior at a glance -- whether reviewing pull requests, debugging issues, or navigating unfamiliar codebases. This ability to reason about dynamic program…

We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…

When implementing secure software, developers must ensure certain requirements, such as the erasure of secret data after its use and execution in real time. Such requirements are not explicitly captured by the C language and could…

Code refactoring is a fundamental software engineering practice aimed at improving code quality and maintainability. Despite its importance, developers often neglect refactoring due to the significant time, effort, and resources it…

Code review is a widespread practice to improve software quality and transfer knowledge. It is often seen as time-consuming due to the need for manual effort and potential delays. Several AI-assisted tools, such as Qodo, GitHub Copilot, and…

Understanding code represents a core ability needed for automating software development tasks. While foundation models like LLMs show impressive results across many software engineering challenges, the extent of their true semantic…