Related papers: Evaluating Code Readability and Legibility: An Exa…

Background: Research software is software developed by and/or used by researchers, across a wide variety of domains, to perform their research. Because of the complexity of research software, developers cannot conduct exhaustive testing. As…

Code optimization is the process of enhancing code efficiency, while preserving its intended functionality. This process often requires a deep understanding of the code execution behavior at run-time to identify and address inefficiencies…

Software reliability is an important quality attrib-ute, often evaluated as either a function of time or of system structures. The goal of this study is to have this metric cover both for component-based software, be-cause its reliability…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming programming practices, offering significant capabilities for code generation activities. While researchers have explored the potential of LLMs in various domains, this paper focuses on their use…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in software engineering to generate, complete, translate, and fix code, improving developer productivity. While most research focuses on the energy consumption and carbon emissions of model…

Does the choice of programming language affect energy consumption? Previous highly visible studies have established associations between certain programming languages and energy consumption. A causal misinterpretation of this work has led…

Being able to duplicate published research results is an important process of conducting research whether to build upon these findings or to compare with them. This process is called "replicability" when using the original authors'…

Code coverage is a widely used metric for quantifying the extent to which program elements, such as statements or branches, are executed during testing. Calculating code coverage is resource-intensive, requiring code building and execution…

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…

We asked students to explain the structure and execution of their small programs after they had submitted them to a programming exercise. These questions about learner's code (QLCs) were delivered at three occasions in an online and open…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding and generating codes. Due to these capabilities, many recent methods are proposed to automatically refine the codes with LLMs. However, we should…

Context: Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. Numerous empirical studies investigating the impact of refactoring activities on software quality have been conducted over the last two decades.…

Understanding how novices reason about coding at a neurological level has implications for training the next generation of software engineers. In recent years, medical imaging has been increasingly employed to investigate patterns of neural…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…

In the era of large language models (LLMs), code benchmarks have become an important research area in software engineering and are widely used by practitioners. These benchmarks evaluate the performance of LLMs on specific code-related…

Despite the growing body of work in interpretable machine learning, it remains unclear how to evaluate different explainability methods without resorting to qualitative assessment and user-studies. While interpretability is an inherently…

ICD coding is the process of mapping unstructured text from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to standardised codes defined by the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) system. In order to promote trust and transparency, existing…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

Recent language models have demonstrated proficiency in summarizing source code. However, as in many other domains of machine learning, language models of code lack sufficient explainability. Informally, we lack a formulaic or intuitive…