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Autonomous coding agents (e.g., OpenAI Codex, Devin, GitHub Copilot) are increasingly used to generate fix-related pull requests (PRs) in real world software repositories. However, their practical effectiveness depends on whether these…

Prior literature has suggested that in many projects 80\% or more of the contributions are made by a small called group of around 20% of the development team. Most prior studies deprecate a reliance on such a small inner group of "heroes",…

Language models (LMs) have exhibited impressive abilities in generating codes from natural language requirements. In this work, we highlight the diversity of code generated by LMs as a critical criterion for evaluating their code generation…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It aims at automatically predicting the next tokens or lines that the programmers tend to use. A good code completion tool can…

Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…

Function merging is a pivotal technique for reducing code size by combining identical or similar functions into a single function. While prior research has extensively explored this technique, it has not been assessed in conjunction with…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used by software engineers for code generation. However, limitations of LLMs such as irrelevant or incorrect code have highlighted the need for prompt programming (or prompt engineering) where…

While technical debt grows in absolute numbers as software systems evolve over time, the density of technical debt (technical debt divided by lines of code) is reduced in some cases. This can be explained by either the application of…

During code reviews, an essential step in software quality assurance, reviewers have the difficult task of understanding and evaluating code changes to validate their quality and prevent introducing faults to the codebase. This is a tedious…

Recent research advocates deploying smaller, specialized code LLMs in agentic frameworks alongside frontier models, sparking interest in efficient strategies for multi-task learning that balance performance, constraints, and costs. We…

Context. Modern Code Review (MCR) is being adopted in both open source and commercial projects as a common practice. MCR is a widely acknowledged quality assurance practice that allows early detection of defects as well as poor coding…

Code Review plays a crucial role in software quality, by allowing reviewers to discuss and critique any new patches before they can be successfully integrated into the project code. Yet, it is unsure the extent to which coding pattern…

Instead of repeatedly re-analyzing from scratch, an incremental static analysis only analyzes a codebase once completely, and then it updates the previous results based on the code changes. While this sounds promising to achieve speed-ups,…

Peer code reviews are crucial for maintaining the quality of the code in software repositories. Developers have introduced a number of software bots to help with the code review process. Despite the benefits of automating code review tasks,…

(Source) code search is widely concerned by software engineering researchers because it can improve the productivity and quality of software development. Given a functionality requirement usually described in a natural language sentence, a…

Large language model (LLM)-based coding agents achieve impressive results on controlled benchmarks yet routinely produce pull requests that real maintainers reject. The root cause is not functional incorrectness but a lack of organicity:…

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

In collaborative software development, program merging is the mechanism to integrate changes from multiple programmers. Merge algorithms in modern version control systems report a conflict when changes interfere textually. Merge conflicts…

As a maintainer of an open source software project, you are usually happy about contributions in the form of pull requests that bring the project a step forward. Past studies have shown that when reviewing a pull request, not only its…