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Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…

Code churn refers to the measure of the amount of code added, modified, or deleted in a project and is often used to assess codebase stability and maintainability. Program comprehension or how understandable the changes are, is equally…

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…

Code review is a widespread practice to improve software quality and transfer knowledge. It is often seen as time-consuming due to the need for manual effort and potential delays. Several AI-assisted tools, such as Qodo, GitHub Copilot, and…

During code reviews, an essential step in software quality assurance, reviewers have the difficult task of understanding and evaluating code changes to validate their quality and prevent introducing faults to the codebase. This is a tedious…

Developers interrupting their participation in a project might slowly forget critical information about the code, such as its intended purpose, structure, the impact of external dependencies, and the approach used for implementation.…

Many small-scale software systems, that is, with limited codebase or binary size, are widely used in everyday tasks, yet their configurability remains largely unexplored. At the same time, studies on modern software systems show a trend…

To explore the prevalence of abrupt changes (changepoints) in open source project activity, we assembled a dataset of 8,919 projects from the World of Code. Projects were selected based on age, number of commits, and number of authors.…

Code changes are performed differently in the mobile and non-mobile platforms. Prior work has investigated the differences in specific platforms. However, we still lack a deeper understanding of how code changes evolve across different…

This paper studies the problem of predicting the coding effort for a subsequent year of development by analysing metrics extracted from project repositories, with an emphasis on projects containing XML code. The study considers thirteen…

Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created - and maintained - synchronously. In this paper we investigate whether production code and the accompanying tests co-evolve by…

Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source…

Code quality is an attribute composed of various metrics, such as complexity, readability, testability, interoperability, reusability, and the use of good or bad practices, among others. Static code analysis tools aim to measure a set of…

Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up…

The widespread availability of large language models (LLMs) has changed how students engage with coding and problem-solving. While these tools may increase student productivity, they also make it more difficult for instructors to assess…

Context: Code review has long been a core practice in collaborative software engineering. As automation becomes increasingly embedded in development workflows, the role and functioning of code review are subject to change. Objective: This…

The focus on rapid software delivery inevitably results in the accumulation of technical debt, which, in turn, affects quality and slows future development. Yet, companies with a long history of rapid delivery exist. Our primary aim is to…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the promise to revolutionize the field of software engineering. Among other things, LLM agents are rapidly gaining momentum in software development, with practitioners reporting a multifold…

In the last few years it has been seen that many software vendors have started delivering projects incrementally with very short release cycles. Best examples of success of this approach has been Ubuntu Operating system that has a 6 months…