Related papers: On the Importance and Shortcomings of Code Readabi…

Code completion, which aims to predict the following code token(s) according to the code context, can improve the productivity of software development. Recent work has proved that statistical language modeling with transformers can greatly…

Resilience broadly describes a quality of withstanding perturbations. Measures of system resilience have gathered increasing attention across applied disciplines, yet existing metrics often lack computational accessibility and…

Software quality is considered as one of the most important challenges in software engineering. It has many dimensions which differ from users' point of view that depend on their requirements. Therefore, those dimensions lead to difficulty…

Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want…

Recent work on interpretability has focused on concept-based explanations, where deep learning models are explained in terms of high-level units of information, referred to as concepts. Concept learning models, however, have been shown to…

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…

Search-based test generators are effective at producing unit tests with high coverage. However, such automatically generated tests have no meaningful test and variable names, making them hard to understand and interpret by developers. On…

Code quality is an attribute composed of various metrics, such as complexity, readability, testability, interoperability, reusability, and the use of good or bad practices, among others. Static code analysis tools aim to measure a set of…

Code editing is a foundational task in software development, where its effectiveness depends on whether it introduces desired code property changes without changing the original code's intended functionality. Existing approaches often…

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 this paper, the authors propose a software metric called Class Activeness Metric which helps to determine the level of accessibility of the members of a class when it is instantiated as objects. Object interactions need to be straight…

Computer programming initially required humans to directly translate their goals into machine code. These goals could have easily been expressed as a written (or human) language directive. Computers, however, had no capacity to…

Effective code documentation is essential for collaboration, comprehension, and long-term software maintainability, yet developers often neglect it due to its repetitive nature. Automated documentation generation has evolved from heuristic…

Readability is a key concept in the current era of abundant written information. To help making texts more readable and make information more accessible to everyone, a line of researched aims at making texts accessible for their target…

The code base of software projects evolves essentially through inserting and removing information to and from the source code. We can measure this evolution via the elements of information - tokens, words, nodes - of the respective…

In this paper, we investigate code-integrated reasoning, where models generate code when necessary and integrate feedback by executing it through a code interpreter. To acquire this capability, models must learn when and how to use external…

Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code by changing its internal structure without affecting its external behaviour, with the main aims of improving the quality of software product. Therefore, there is a belief…

Software testing is an important issue in software development process to ensure higher quality on the products. Formal methods has been promising on testing reactive systems, specially critical systems, where accuracy is mandatory since…

Source code comes in different shapes and forms. Previous research has already shown code to be more predictable than natural language as well as highlighted its statistical predictability at the token level: source code can be natural.…

Code generation models have achieved impressive performance. However, they tend to be brittle as slight edits to a prompt could lead to very different generations; these robustness properties, critical for user experience when deployed in…