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Code review is a critical software engineering practice where developers review code changes before integration to ensure code quality, detect defects, and improve maintainability. In recent years, AI agents that can understand code…

Software engineers who collaborate to develop software in teams often have to manually merge changes they made to a module (e.g. a class), because the change conflicts with one that has just been made by another engineer to the same or…

The popularity of machine learning has wildly expanded in recent years. Machine learning techniques have been heatedly studied in academia and applied in the industry to create business value. However, there is a lack of guidelines for code…

Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…

An essential part of research and scientific communication is researchers' ability to reproduce the results of others. While there have been increasing standards for authors to make data and code available, many of these files are hard to…

Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…

Context: Code annotations have gained widespread popularity in programming languages, offering developers the ability to attach metadata to code elements to define custom behaviors. Many modern frameworks and APIs use annotations to keep…

Quality aspects such as ethics, fairness, and transparency have been proven to be essential for trustworthy software systems. Explainability has been identified not only as a means to achieve all these three aspects in systems, but also as…

Background: Contemporary software development organizations lack diversity and the ratios of women in Free and open-source software (FOSS) communities are even lower than the industry average. Although the results of recent studies hint the…

Due to the growing complexity of software systems, there has been a dramatic increase and industry demand for tools and techniques on software refactoring in the last ten years, defined traditionally as a set of program transformations…

Block-based environments are visual programming environments, which are becoming more and more popular because of their ease of use. The ease of use comes thanks to their intuitive graphical representation and structural metaphors…

Coding standards and good practices are fundamental to a disciplined approach to software projects, whatever programming languages they employ. Prolog programming can benefit from such an approach, perhaps more than programming in other…

Data contamination presents a critical barrier preventing widespread industrial adoption of advanced software engineering techniques that leverage code language models (CLMs). This phenomenon occurs when evaluation data inadvertently…

In the era of revolution, the development of softwares are increasing daily. The quality of software impacts the most in software development. To ensure the quality of the software it needs to be reviewed and updated. The effectiveness of…

As programmers write code, they often edit and retry multiple times, creating rich "interaction traces" that reveal how they approach coding tasks and provide clues about their level of skill development. For novice programmers in…

Most modern software products incorporate open-source components, requiring development teams to maintain compliance with each component's licenses. Noncompliance can have significant financial, legal, and reputational repercussions.…

Code Review consists in assessing the code written by teammates with the goal of increasing code quality. Empirical studies documented the benefits brought by such a practice that, however, has its cost to pay in terms of developers' time.…

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…

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…

Code review is a critical practice in modern software engineering, helping developers detect defects early, improve code quality, and facilitate knowledge sharing. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), a growing body…