Related papers: Comments on Comments: Where Code Review and Docume…

Autonomous coding agents are reshaping software development by creating pull requests (PRs) on GitHub, referred to as agentic PRs. In parallel, the review process is also becoming autonomous, thereby making reviewer bots key actors in the…

Discussions is a new feature of GitHub for asking questions or discussing topics outside of specific Issues or Pull Requests. Before being available to all projects in December 2020, it had been tested on selected open source software…

Code review is a key element of quality assurance in software development. Determining the right reviewer for a given code change requires understanding the characteristics of the changed code, identifying the skills of each potential…

Code comments play a prominent role in program comprehension activities. However, source code is not always documented and code and comments not always co-evolve. To deal with these issues, researchers have proposed techniques to…

Context: In the realm of software development, maintaining high software quality is a persistent challenge. However, this challenge is often impeded by the lack of comprehensive understanding of how specific code modifications influence…

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has changed software development, with tools like Copilot, JetBrains AI Assistant, and others boosting developers' productivity. However, developers now spend more time reviewing code than…

The immense amounts of source code provide ample challenges and opportunities during software development. To handle the size of code bases, developers commonly search for code, e.g., when trying to find where a particular feature is…

We formulate the novel task of automatically updating an existing natural language comment based on changes in the body of code it accompanies. We propose an approach that learns to correlate changes across two distinct language…

Background: Research software is software developed by and/or used by researchers, across a wide variety of domains, to perform their research. Because of the complexity of research software, developers cannot conduct exhaustive testing. As…

Comments, or natural language descriptions of source code, are standard practice among software developers. By communicating important aspects of the code such as functionality and usage, comments help with software project maintenance.…

Comments in software are critical for maintenance and reuse. But apart from prescriptive advice, there is little practical support or quantitative understanding of what makes a comment useful. In this paper, we introduce the task of…

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly integrated into software engineering and maintenance tasks due to their high performance with software engineering tasks and robust understanding of modern programming languages. However,…

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…

Providing constructive feedback to paper authors is a core component of peer review. With reviewers increasingly having less time to perform reviews, automated support systems are required to ensure high reviewing quality, thus making the…

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…

Code review is a key development practice that contributes to improve software quality and to foster knowledge sharing among developers. However, code review usually takes time and demands detailed and time-consuming analysis of textual…

Code review is essential for maintaining software quality but often time-consuming and cognitively demanding, especially in industrial environments. Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have opened new avenues for automating core…

Code review is a crucial component of modern software development, involving the evaluation of code quality, providing feedback on potential issues, and refining the code to address identified problems. Despite these benefits, code review…

Primitive types are fundamental components available in any programming language, which serve as the building blocks of data manipulation. Understanding the role of these types in source code is essential to write software. Little work has…

Method-level comments are critical for improving code comprehension and supporting software maintenance. With advancements in large language models (LLMs), automated comment generation has become a major research focus. However, existing…