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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,…

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…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

As the current COBOL workforce retires, entry-level developers are left to keep complex legacy systems maintained and operational. This creates a massive gap in knowledge and ability as companies are having their veteran developers replaced…

Zero-day vulnerabilities can be accidentally or maliciously placed in code and can remain in place for years. In this study, we address an aspect of their longevity by considering the likelihood that they will be discovered in the code…

Natural language comments convey key aspects of source code such as implementation, usage, and pre- and post-conditions. Failure to update comments accordingly when the corresponding code is modified introduces inconsistencies, which is…

Due to their pivotal role in software engineering, considerable effort is spent on the quality assurance of software requirements specifications. As they are mainly described in natural language, relatively few means of automated quality…

Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in…

GitHub is the most widely used platform for software maintenance in the open-source community. Developers report issues on GitHub from time to time while facing difficulties. Having labels on those issues can help developers easily address…

As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…

Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is…

Code documentation can, if written precisely, help developers better understand the code they accompany. However, unlike code, code documentation cannot be automatically verified via execution, potentially leading to inconsistencies between…

In open-source projects, anyone can contribute, so it is important to have an active continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in addition to a protocol for reporting security concerns, especially in projects that are…

Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

Source code similarity are increasingly used in application development to identify clones, isolate bugs, and find copy-rights violations. Similar code fragments can be very problematic due to the fact that errors in the original code must…

In modern software engineering, build systems play the crucial role of facilitating the conversion of source code into software artifacts. Recent research has explored high-level causes of build failures, but has largely overlooked the…

GitHub is one of the most widely used public code development platform. However, the code hosted publicly on the platform is vulnerable to commit spoofing that allows an adversary to introduce malicious code or commits into the repository…

Comments are an integral part of software development; they are natural language descriptions associated with source code elements. Understanding explicit associations can be useful in improving code comprehensibility and maintaining the…

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…

Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…