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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding and generating codes. Due to these capabilities, many recent methods are proposed to automatically refine the codes with LLMs. However, we should…

This paper describes the results of a large (+1100 responses) survey of professional software developers concerning standards for naming source code methods. The various standards for source code method names are derived from and supported…

Code analysis is fundamental in Software Engineering, supporting debugging, optimization, and security assessment. Human developers approach it through syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. Traditional tools are…

Context: Code reviews are crucial for software quality. Recent AI advances have allowed large language models (LLMs) to review and fix code; now, there are tools that perform these reviews. However, their reliability and accuracy have not…

Software quality research increasingly relies on large-scale datasets that measure both the product and process aspects of software systems. However, existing resources often focus on limited dimensions, such as code smells, technical debt,…

As one of the most well-known programmer Q&A websites, Stack Overflow (i.e., SO) is serving tens of thousands of developers every day. Previous work has shown that many developers reuse the code snippets on SO when they find an answer (from…

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

A fundamental unit of work in programming is the code contribution ("commit") that a developer makes to the code base of the project in work. An author's commit frequency describes how often that author commits. Knowing the distribution of…

Multilingual programming, which involves using multiple programming languages (PLs) in a single project, is increasingly common due to its benefits. However, it introduces cross-language bugs (CLBs), which arise from interactions between…

AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…

Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…

Abridged: Programmer attention represents the visual focus of programmers on parts of the source code in pursuit of programming tasks. We conducted an in-depth human study with 10 Java programmers, where each programmer generated summaries…

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.…

Data of long-lived and high profile projects is valuable for research on successful software engineering in the wild. Having a dataset with different linked software repositories of such projects, enables deeper diving investigations. This…

The open-source software (OSS) community has historically been dominated by English as the primary language for code, documentation, and developer interactions. However, with growing global participation and better support for non-Latin…

Abnormal working hours can reduce work health, general well-being, and productivity, independent from a profession. To inform future approaches for automatic stress and overload detection, this paper establishes empirically collected…

Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…

Reliability, longevity, availability, and deadline guarantees are the four most important metrics to measure the QoS of long-running safety-critical real-time applications. Software aging is one of the major factors that impact the safety…

From science to industry, teamwork plays a crucial role in knowledge production and innovation. Most studies consider teams as static groups of individuals, thereby failing to capture how the micro-dynamics of collaborative processes and…

Modular programming, which aims to construct the final program by integrating smaller, independent building blocks, has been regarded as a desirable practice in software development. However, with the rise of recent code generation agents…