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Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…
Effective peer code review in collaborative software development necessitates useful reviewer comments and supportive automated tools. Code review comments are a central component of the Modern Code Review process in the industry and…
AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…
Code reviews are popular in both industrial and open source projects. The benefits of code reviews are widely recognized and include better code quality and lower likelihood of introducing bugs. However, since code review is a manual…
We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…
Code reviews are central for software quality assurance. Ideally, reviewers should explain their feedback to enable authors of code changes to understand the feedback and act accordingly. Different developers might need different…
GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…
Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…
Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…
Although peer code review is widely adopted in both commercial and open source development, existing studies suggest that such code reviews often contain a significant amount of non-useful review comments. Unfortunately, to date, no tools…
Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…
Developers use tools such as GitHub pull requests to review code, discuss proposed changes, and request modifications. While changed files are commonly presented in alphabetical order, this does not necessarily coincide with the reviewer's…
Code review is a mature practice for software quality assurance in software development with which reviewers check the code that has been committed by developers, and verify the quality of code. During the code review discussions, reviewers…
Code comments are important for program comprehension, development, and maintenance tasks. Given the varying standards for code comments, and their unstructured or semi-structured nature, developers get easily confused (especially novice…
Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…
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…
Code review is a common process that is used by developers, in which a reviewer provides useful comments or points out defects in the submitted source code changes via pull request. Code review has been widely used for both industry and…
Natural language comments convey key aspects of source code such as implementation, usage, and pre- and post-conditions. Failure to update comments accordingly when the corresponding code is modified introduces inconsistencies, which is…
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a new era in automated code translation across programming languages. Since most code-specific LLMs are pretrained on well-commented code from large repositories like GitHub, it is…
Large language model (LLM)-powered code review automation tools have been introduced to generate code review comments. However, not all generated comments will drive code changes. Understanding what types of generated review comments are…