Related papers: Detecting Outdated Code Element References in Soft…

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the…

Online code clones are code fragments that are copied from software projects or online sources to Stack Overflow as examples. Due to an absence of a checking mechanism after the code has been copied to Stack Overflow, they can become toxic…

With the recent explosion in the size and complexity of source codebases and software projects, the need for efficient source code search engines has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, existing information retrieval-based methods fail…

Good software documentation encourages good software engineering, but the meaning of "good" documentation is vaguely defined in the software engineering literature. To clarify this ambiguity, we draw on work from the data and information…

This paper illustrates an empirical study of the working efficiency of machine learning techniques in classifying code review text by semantic meaning. The code review comments from the source control repository in GitHub were extracted for…

Code review is a popular practice where developers critique each others' changes. Since automated builds can identify low-level issues (e.g., syntactic errors, regression bugs), it is not uncommon for software organizations to incorporate…

Technical debt (TD) refers to delayed tasks and immature artifacts that may bring short-term benefits but incur extra costs of change during maintenance and evolution in the long term. TD has been extensively studied in the past decade, and…

Code review is a widely-used practice in software development companies to identify defects. Hence, code review has been included in many software engineering curricula at universities worldwide. However, teaching code review is still a…

When lambda expressions were introduced to the Java programming language as part of the release of Java 8 in 2014, they were the language's first step into functional programming. Since lambda expressions are still relatively new, not all…

Modern programming languages like Java require runtime systems to support the implementation and deployment of software applications in diverse computing platforms and operating systems. These runtime systems are normally developed in…

Bugs are inescapable during software development due to frequent code changes, tight deadlines, etc.; therefore, it is important to have tools to find these errors. One way of performing bug identification is to analyze the characteristics…

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…

Context: Software code reviews are an important part of the development process, leading to better software quality and reduced overall costs. However, finding appropriate code reviewers is a complex and time-consuming task. Goals: In this…

Writing documentation about software internals is rarely considered a rewarding activity. It is highly time-consuming and the resulting documentation is fragile when the software is continuously evolving in a multi-developer setting.…

Software redesign preserves functionality while improving quality attributes, but manual reuse of code and tests is costly and error-prone, especially in crossrepository redesigns. Focusing on static analyzers where cross-repo redesign…

Background: Evolution of open source projects frequently depends on a small number of core developers. The loss of such core developers might be detrimental for projects and even threaten their entire continuation. However, it is possible…

The code base of software projects evolves essentially through inserting and removing information to and from the source code. We can measure this evolution via the elements of information - tokens, words, nodes - of the respective…

One common task of developing or maintaining software is searching the source code for information like specific method calls or write accesses to certain fields. This kind of information is required to correctly implement new features and…

Bug reports provide critical insights into software quality, yet existing datasets often suffer from limited scope, outdated content, or insufficient metadata for machine learning. To address these limitations, we present GitBugs-a…

Open-source repositories provide wealth of information and are increasingly being used to build artificial intelligence (AI) based systems to solve problems in software engineering. Open-source repositories could be of varying quality…