Related papers: IntelliTC: Automating Type Changes in IntelliJ IDE…

Java's type system mostly relies on type checking augmented with local type inference to improve programmer convenience. We study global type inference for Featherweight Generic Java (FGJ), a functional Java core language. Given generic…

MOVEMETHOD is a hallmark refactoring. Despite a plethora of research tools that recommend which methods to move and where, these recommendations do not align with how expert developers perform MOVEMETHOD. Given the extensive training of…

We aim to explore how developers document their refactoring activities during the software life cycle. We call such activity Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR), which indicates developers' documentation of their refactoring activities. SAR is…

Software undergoes constant changes to support new requirements, address bugs, enhance performance, and ensure maintainability. Thus, developers spend a great portion of their workday trying to understand and review the code changes of…

We present the Code Documentation and Analysis Tool (CoDAT). CoDAT is a tool designed to maintain consistency between the various levels of code documentation, e.g. if a line in a code sketch is changed, the comment that documents the…

Background: The renaming of program identifiers is the most common refactoring operation. Because some identifiers are related to each other, developers may need to rename related identifiers together. Aims: To understand how developers…

The process of writing code and use of features in an integrated development environment (IDE) is a fruitful source of data in computing education research. Existing studies use records of students' actions in the IDE, consecutive code…

Many code changes that developers make in their projects are repeated and constitute recurrent change patterns. It is of interest to collect such patterns from the version history of open-source repositories and suggest the most useful of…

Widely used complex code refactoring tools lack a solid reasoning about the correctness of the transformations they implement, whilst interest in proven correct refactoring is ever increasing as only formal verification can provide true…

Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior while improving its internal structure. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and…

We investigated how programmers express high-level concepts such as path names and coordinates using primitive data types. While relying too much on primitive data types is sometimes criticized as a bad smell, it is still a common practice…

Software development is a complex process that includes many different tasks besides just writing code. One of the aspects of software engineering is selecting and managing licenses for the given project. In this paper, we present Sorrel -…

The sound identification of refactoring opportunities is still an open problem in software engineering. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of machine learning models in recommending methods that should undergo different refactoring…

As language models have become increasingly successful at a wide array of tasks, different prompt engineering methods have been developed alongside them in order to adapt these models to new tasks. One of them is Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT), a…

This report investigates the relationship between software refactoring and behavior preservation. Existing behavior preservation analyses often lack comprehensive insights into refactoring rejections and do not provide actionable solutions.…

Novice programmers often struggle to comprehend code due to vague naming, deep nesting, and poor structural organization. While explanations may offer partial support, they typically do not restructure the code itself. We propose code…

Python type annotations enable static type checking, but most code remains untyped because manual annotation is time-consuming and tedious. Past approaches to automatic type inference fall short: static methods struggle with dynamic…

In the last two decades, tools have been implemented to more formally specify the semantic analysis phase of a compiler instead of relying on handwritten code. In this paper, we introduce patterns and a method to translate a formal…

Context : Software comprehension and maintenance activities, such as refactoring, are said to be negatively impacted by software complexity. The methods used to measure software product and processes complexity have been thoroughly debated…

Instruction tuning has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing large language models in following human instructions. It is shown that increasing the diversity and number of instructions in the training data can consistently enhance…