Related papers: Relationship between Gender and Code Reading Speed…
Addressing women's under-representation in the software industry, a widely recognized concern, requires attracting as well as retaining more women. Hearing from women practitioners, particularly those positioned in multi-cultural settings,…
Remote pair programming is widely used in software development, but no research has examined how race affects these interactions. We embarked on this study due to the historical under representation of Black developers in the tech industry,…
There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is…
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…
Testing is an indispensable part of software development. However, a career in software testing is reported to be unpopular among students in computer science and related areas. This can potentially create a shortage of testers in the…
The use of Generative AI (GenAI) tools in software development has raised questions about their impact on productivity, code quality, and developer practices. Prior research presents mixed findings, with objective analyses identifying…
Women represent less than 24% of employees in the software development industry and experience various types of prejudice and bias. Despite various efforts to increase diversity and multi-gendered participation, women are even more…
Modern society is diverse, multicultural, and multifaceted. Because of these characteristics, we are currently observing an increase in the debates about equity, diversity, and inclusion in different areas, especially because several groups…
Context. Considering the importance of software testing to the development of high quality and reliable software systems, this paper aims to investigate how can work-related factors influence the motivation of software testers. Method. We…
We investigate how code obfuscation influences human understanding of programs through an output-prediction task. To study this effect, we construct multiple levels of obfuscation, ranging from unobfuscated code to transformations involving…
Understanding factors that influence software development velocity is crucial for engineering teams and organizations, yet empirical evidence at scale remains limited. A more robust understanding of the dynamics of cycle time may help…
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…
Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are an essential entry point to computer science. In order to create an effective learning environment that has the potential to address the gender imbalance in computer science, it is…
Background: Studies on developer productivity and well-being find that the perceptions of productivity in a software team can be a socio-technical problem. Intuitively, problems and challenges can be better handled by managing expectations…
Generative AI agents are reshaping human-computer interaction, shifting users from direct task execution to supervising machine-driven actions, especially the rise of "vibe coding" in programming. Yet little is known about how screen reader…
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…
Young learners are increasingly introduced to programming, and one of the main challenges for educators is to achieve learning success while also creating enthusiasm. As it is particularly difficult to achieve this enthusiasm initially in…
Code search engines usually use readability feature to rank code snippets. There are several metrics to calculate this feature, but developers may have different perceptions about readability. Correlation between readability and…
Background: Research software is crucial for enabling research discoveries and supporting data analysis, simulation, and interpretation across domains. However, evolving requirements, complex inputs, and legacy dependencies hinder the…
Code review is a well-established and valued practice in the software engineering community contributing to both code quality and interpersonal benefits. However, there are challenges in both tools and processes that give rise to…