Related papers: Improving Semantic Consistency of Variable Names w…

Business process models abstract complex business processes by representing them as graphical models. Their layout, solely determined by the modeler, affects their understandability. To support the construction of understandable models it…

Following code style conventions in software projects is essential for maintaining overall code quality. Adhering to these conventions improves maintainability, understandability, and extensibility. Additionally, following best practices…

The problem of resolving virtual method and interface calls in object-oriented languages has been a long standing challenge to the program analysis community. The complexities are due to various reasons, such as increased levels of class…

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…

Every programmer has a characteristic style, ranging from preferences about identifier naming to preferences about object relationships and design patterns. Coding conventions define a consistent syntactic style, fostering readability and…

Identifier names, which comprise a significant portion of the codebase, are the cornerstone of effective program comprehension. However, research has shown that poorly chosen names can significantly increase cognitive load and hinder…

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Refactoring is an essential activity during software evolution. Frequently, practitioners rely on such transformations to improve source code maintainability and quality. As a consequence, this process may produce new source code entities…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

Developers routinely work with source files whose variable names are generic or misleading, and with teams moving quickly, many functions are left undocumented. This slows comprehension, increases the risk of subtle bugs, and makes it…

Context: Software metrics, as one form of static analyses, is a commonly used approach in software engineering in order to understand the state of a software system, in particular to identify potential areas prone to defects. Family-based…

Learning tasks on source code (i.e., formal languages) have been considered recently, but most work has tried to transfer natural language methods and does not capitalize on the unique opportunities offered by code's known syntax. For…

With the rapid increasing of software project size and maintenance cost, adherence to coding standards especially by managing identifier naming, is attracting a pressing concern from both computer science educators and software managers.…

Source code similarity are increasingly used in application development to identify clones, isolate bugs, and find copy-rights violations. Similar code fragments can be very problematic due to the fact that errors in the original code must…

It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code written in a…

Programmers often add meaningful information about program semantics when naming program entities such as variables, functions, and macros. However, static analysis tools typically discount this information when they look for bugs in a…

Consistency, defined as the requirement that a series of measurements of the same project carried out by different raters using the same method should produce similar results, is one of the most important aspects to be taken into account in…

In software development, the identification of source code file experts is an important task. Identifying these experts helps to improve software maintenance and evolution activities, such as developing new features, code reviews, and bug…

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…

Software comprehension can be extremely time-consuming due to the ever-growing size of codebases. Consequently, there is an increasing need to accelerate the code comprehension process to facilitate maintenance and reduce associated costs.…