Related papers: "To Clean-Code or Not To Clean-Code" A Survey amon…

While technical debt grows in absolute numbers as software systems evolve over time, the density of technical debt (technical debt divided by lines of code) is reduced in some cases. This can be explained by either the application of…

AI code generation tools are transforming software development, especially for novice and non-software developers, by enabling them to write code and build applications faster and with little to no human intervention. Vibe coding is the…

Context: Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. Numerous empirical studies investigating the impact of refactoring activities on software quality have been conducted over the last two decades.…

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…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Software systems play an ever more important role in our lives and software engineers and their companies find themselves in a position where they are held responsible for ethical issues that may arise. In this paper, we try to disentangle…

Scientists across disciplines write code for critical activities like data collection and generation, statistical modeling, and visualization. As large language models that can generate code have become widely available, scientists may…

Qualitative data analysis provides insight into the underlying perceptions and experiences within unstructured data. However, the time-consuming nature of the coding process, especially for larger datasets, calls for innovative approaches,…

Context: Software code review aims to early find code anomalies and to perform code improvements when they are less expensive. However, issues and challenges faced by developers who do not apply code review practices regularly are unclear.…

This paper deals with the importance of developing codes of conduct for practitioners--be it journalists, doctors, attorneys, or other professions--that are encountering ethical issues when using computation, but do not have access to any…

Websites are frequently used by programmers to support the development process. This paper investigates programmer-Web interactions when coding, and combines observations of behaviour with assessments of the resulting source code. We report…

This paper focuses on Code Generation task that aims at generating relevant code fragments according to given natural language descriptions. In the process of software development, developers often encounter two scenarios. One is requested…

Code smells as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Many times they are the result of so called technical debt. Our study showed that the interest in code smells research is increasing. However, most of the publications are…

Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

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…

Large language models trained on source code can support a variety of software development tasks, such as code recommendation and program repair. Large amounts of data for training such models benefit the models' performance. However, the…

Understanding program code is a complicated endeavor. As such, myriad different factors can influence the outcome. Investigations of program comprehension, and in particular those using controlled experiments, have to take these factors…

We are entering a hybrid era in which human developers and AI coding agents work in the same codebases. While industry practice has long optimized code for human comprehension, it is increasingly important to ensure that LLMs with different…