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

Recent advances in coding agents have shown remarkable progress in software issue resolution. In practice, real-world issues are typically bug fixes or feature requests in which human developers naturally incorporate refactoring as part of…

Refactoring is an established technique from the OO-community to restructure code: it aims at improving software readability, maintainability and extensibility. Although refactoring is not tied to the OO-paradigm in particular, its ideas…

Code review has evolved for decades, from informal peer checking to today's pull request (PR) workflows, yet it remains a largely manual, uneven, and cognitively demanding process. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding assistants…

Advances in technologies like artificial intelligence and metaverse have led to a proliferation of software systems in business and everyday life. With this widespread penetration, the carbon emissions of software are rapidly growing as…

Code review is a critical step in the software development life cycle, which assesses and boosts the code's effectiveness and correctness, pinpoints security issues, and raises its quality by adhering to best practices. Due to the increased…

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…

The modern code review process is an integral part of the current software development practice. Considerable effort is given here to inspect code changes, find defects, suggest an improvement, and address the suggestions of the reviewers.…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…

Over the past decade, modern code review (MCR) has been established as a cornerstone of software quality assurance and a vital channel for knowledge transfer within development teams. However, the manual inspection of increasingly complex…

We need ways to improve the code quality. Programmers have different level of tenure and experience. Standard and programming languages change and we are forced to re-use legacy code with minimum revision. Programmers develop their habits…

Inspection of code changes is a time-consuming task that constitutes a big part of everyday work of software engineers. Existing IDEs provide little information about the semantics of code changes within the file editor view. Therefore…

Code review (CR) is essential to software development, helping ensure that new code is properly integrated. However, the CR process often involves significant effort, including code adjustments, responses to reviewers, and continued…

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…

Refactoring is a crucial technique for improving the efficiency and maintainability of software by restructuring its internal design while preserving its external behavior. While classical programs have benefited from various refactoring…

Commits often involve refactorings -- behavior-preserving code modifications aiming at software design improvements. Refactoring operations pose a challenge to code reviewers, as distinguishing them from behavior-altering changes is often…

Background. Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, and are employed both in open-source and industrial contexts. One of the main goals of code reviews is to find defects in the code, allowing…

Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread popularity and have steadily improved over time, enabling software developers to use them for various code-related tasks. One common task is code refactoring, where the LLM suggests…

Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query.…

Software systems are evolving by adding new functions and modifying existing functions over time. Through the evolution, the structure of software is becoming more complex and so the understandability and maintainability of software systems…

Code review is a crucial process before deploying code to production, as it validates the code, provides suggestions for improvements, and identifies errors such as missed edge cases. In projects with regular production releases, the effort…