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Documenting the functionality of software units with code comments, e.g., Javadoc comments, is a common programmer best-practice in software engineering. This paper introduces a novel test generation technique that exploits the code-comment…
A code clone is a pair of code fragments, within or between software systems that are similar. Since code clones often negatively impact the maintainability of a software system, several code clone detection techniques and tools have been…
AI code generation tools have gained significant popularity among developers, who use them to assist in software development due to their capability to generate code. Existing studies mainly explored the quality, e.g., correctness and…
The rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly realised through Machine Learning (ML) pipelines that integrate data preprocessing, model training, evaluation scripts, and configuration-heavy experimentation code. In…
Test smells arise from poor design practices and insufficient domain knowledge, which can lower the quality of test code and make it harder to maintain and update. Manually refactoring test smells is time-consuming and error-prone,…
When writing source code, programmers have varying levels of freedom when it comes to the creation and use of identifiers. Do they habitually use the same identifiers, names that are different to those used by others? Is it then possible to…
Background. Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, and are employed both in open-source and industrial contexts. One of the main goals of code reviews is to find defects in the code, allowing…
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…
Understanding what drives code instability is essential for effective software maintenance, as unstable classes require larger or more frequent edits and increase the risk of unintended side effects. Although code smells are widely believed…
Automated batch refactoring has become a de-facto mechanism to restructure software that may have significant design flaws negatively impacting the code quality and maintainability. Although automated batch refactoring techniques are known…
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…
Code review is a critical software engineering practice where developers review code changes before integration to ensure code quality, detect defects, and improve maintainability. In recent years, AI agents that can understand code…
In software engineering, it is not enough to simply write code that only works as intended, even if it is free from vulnerabilities and bugs. Every programming language has a style guide and a set of best practices defined by its community,…
Code comments are the primary means to document implementation and facilitate program comprehension. Thus, their quality should be a primary concern to improve program maintenance. While much effort has been dedicated to detecting bad…
Software testing is still a manual process in many industries, despite the recent improvements in automated testing techniques. As a result, test cases are often specified in natural language by different employees and many redundant test…
Diverse studies have analyzed the quality of automatically generated test cases by using test smells as the main quality attribute. But recent work reported that generated tests may suffer a number of quality issues not necessarily…
To evaluate how developers perform differently in solving programming tasks, i.e., which actions and behaviours are more beneficial to them than others and if there are any specific strategies and behaviours that may indicate good versus…
Developers create software branches for tentative feature addition and bug fixing, and periodically merge branches to release software with new features or repairing patches. When the program edits from different branches textually overlap…
This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…
This paper illustrates an empirical study of the working efficiency of machine learning techniques in classifying code review text by semantic meaning. The code review comments from the source control repository in GitHub were extracted for…