Related papers: Code Review Practices for Refactoring Changes: An …

Developer turnover is inevitable on software projects and leads to knowledge loss, a reduction in productivity, and an increase in defects. Mitigation strategies to deal with turnover tend to disrupt and increase workloads for developers.…

Refactorings must not alter the program's functionality. However, not all refactorings fulfill this requirement. Hence, one must explicitly check that a refactoring does not alter the functionality. Since one rarely has a formal…

One of the main challenges that developers face when testing their systems lies in engineering test cases that are good enough to reveal bugs. And while our body of knowledge on software testing and automated test case generation is already…

Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…

Readability models and tools have been proposed to measure the effort to read code. However, these models are not completely able to capture the quality improvements in code as perceived by developers. To investigate possible features for…

The automation of code review has been tackled by several researchers with the goal of reducing its cost. The adoption of deep learning in software engineering pushed the automation to new boundaries, with techniques imitating developers in…

(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…

With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…

Background: During software maintenance and development, the comprehension of program code is key to success. High-quality comments can help us better understand programs, but they're often missing or outmoded in today's programs. Automatic…

As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…

Cognitive biases appear during code review. They significantly impact the creation of feedback and how it is interpreted by developers. These biases can lead to illogical reasoning and decision-making, violating one of the main hypotheses…

Software systems are getting more complex as the system grows where maintaining such system is a primary concern for the industry. Code clone is one of the factors making software maintenance more difficult. It is a process of replicating…

Sampling diverse programs from a code language model and reranking with model likelihood is a popular method for code generation but it is prone to preferring degenerate solutions. Inspired by collaborative programming, we propose…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…

This research paper aims to find, analyze and understand code patterns in any software system and measure its quality by defining standards and proposing a formula for the same. Every code that is written can be divided into different code…

In pull-based development systems, code reviews and pull request comments play important roles in improving code quality. In such systems, reviewers attempt to carefully check a piece of code by different unit tests. Unfortunately,…

Recent years have seen growing interest in the retrofitting of type systems onto dynamically-typed programming languages, in order to improve type safety, programmer productivity, or performance. In such cases, type system developers must…

Background: Test-driven development (TDD) is a technique that repeats short coding cycles interleaved with testing. The developer first writes a unit test for the desired functionality, followed by the necessary production code, and…

This paper studies the problem of predicting the coding effort for a subsequent year of development by analysing metrics extracted from project repositories, with an emphasis on projects containing XML code. The study considers thirteen…

Code review is an essential component of software development, playing a vital role in ensuring a comprehensive check of code changes. However, the continuous influx of pull requests and the limited pool of available reviewer candidates…