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A source code difference (diff) indicates changes made by comparing new and old source codes, and it can be utilized in code reviews to help developers understand the changes made to the code. Although many diff generation methods have been…

Developers use and contribute to repositories on GitHub. Documentation present in the repositories serves as an important source by helping developers to understand, maintain and contribute to the project. Currently, documentation in a…

What is the effect of releasing a preprint of a paper before it is submitted for peer review? No randomized controlled trial has been conducted, so we turn to observational data to answer this question. We use data from the ICLR conference…

Screening or assessing studies is critical to the quality and outcomes of a systematic review. Typically, a Boolean query retrieves the set of studies to screen. As the set of studies retrieved is unordered, screening all retrieved studies…

Code review is a common practice in software development and often conducted before code changes are merged into the code repository. A number of approaches for automatically recommending appropriate reviewers have been proposed to match…

To effectively guide the exploration of the code transform space for automated code evolution techniques, we present in this paper the first approach for structurally predicting code transforms at the level of AST nodes using conditional…

To avoid software vulnerabilities, organizations are shifting security to earlier stages of the software development, such as at code review time. In this paper, we aim to understand the developers' perspective on assessing software…

App reviews reflect various user requirements that can aid in planning maintenance tasks. Recently, proposed approaches for automatically classifying user reviews rely on machine learning algorithms. A previous study demonstrated that…

In modern day society, the ability to code is a highly desirable skill. So much so that the current supply from third level institutes across the world does not meet the high demands of industry. One of the major issues is the low…

Test Case Prioritization (TCP) is an increasingly important regression testing technique for reordering test cases according to a pre-defined goal, particularly as agile practices gain adoption. To better understand these techniques, we…

Recently, there have been original attempts to use the concept of "code similarity" in program repair, suggesting that similarity analysis has an important role in the repair process. However, there is no dedicated work to characterize and…

Code analyzers such as Error Prone and FindBugs detect code patterns symptomatic of bugs, performance issues, or bad style. These tools express patterns as quick fixes that detect and rewrite unwanted code. However, it is difficult to come…

LLMs are increasingly embedded in programming workflows, from code generation to automated code review. Yet, how gendered communication styles interact with LLM-assisted programming and code review remains underexplored. We present a…

Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…

Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…

Code review is an integral part of any mature software development process, and identifying the best reviewer for a code change is a well-accepted problem within the software engineering community. Selecting a reviewer who lacks expertise…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

With technical performance being similar for various web browsers, improving user perceived performance is integral to optimizing browser quality. We investigated the importance of priming, which has a well-documented ability to affect…

Open Source Software (OSS) projects rely on a continuous stream of new contributors for their livelihood. Recent studies reported that new contributors experience many barriers in their first contribution, with the social barrier being…

Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…