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Background: Everything as Code (EaC) is an emerging paradigm aiming to codify all aspects of modern software systems. Despite its growing popularity, comprehensive industry standards and peer-reviewed research clarifying its scope and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across software engineering tasks, from code generation to translation. However, we identify and systematically evaluate a critical failure mode: Programming Language…

The software development community has been using code quality metrics for the last five decades. Despite their wide adoption, code quality metrics have attracted a fair share of criticism. In this paper, first, we carry out a qualitative…

This research paper aims to find, analyze and understand code patterns in any software system and measure its quality by defining standards and proposing a formula for the same. Every code that is written can be divided into different code…

Intermediate variables can be used to break complex expressions into more manageable smaller expressions, which may be easier to understand. But it is unclear when and whether this actually helps. We conducted an experiment in which…

Background and Context: Some skills taught in introductory programming courses are categorized into 1) explaining code, 2) arranging lines of code in correct sequence, 3) tracing through the execution of a program, and 4) writing code from…

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) ensure interpretability by decomposing predictions into human interpretable concepts. Yet the annotations used for training CBMs that enable this transparency are often noisy, and the impact of such…

With the climate crisis looming, engineering sustainable software systems become crucial to optimize resource utilization, minimize environmental impact, and foster a greener, more resilient digital ecosystem. For developers, getting access…

Interpretability methods aim to help users build trust in and understand the capabilities of machine learning models. However, existing approaches often rely on abstract, complex visualizations that poorly map to the task at hand or require…

Predicting the complexity of source code is essential for software development and algorithm analysis. Recently, Baik et al. (2025) introduced CodeComplex for code time complexity prediction. The paper shows that LLMs without fine-tuning…

Interpretability and explainability have gained more and more attention in the field of machine learning as they are crucial when it comes to high-stakes decisions and troubleshooting. Since both provide information about predictors and…

Reliability prediction is crucial for ensuring the safety and security of software systems, especially in the context of industry practices. While various metrics and measurements are employed to assess software reliability, the complexity…

In this paper, we present a challenging code reasoning task: vulnerability detection. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in natural-language and math reasoning, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) models reported only 54.5%…

Code reuse is a widespread practice across software development projects, suggesting an inherent trust in the reused code. Yet, there is a lack of a fundamental understanding of developers' trust and how various factors mold their…

As opaque decision systems are being increasingly adopted in almost any application field, issues about their lack of transparency and human readability are a concrete concern for end-users. Amongst existing proposals to associate…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in code-related tasks, but their robustness in code reasoning under perturbations remains underexplored. We introduce CodeCrash, a stress-testing framework with…

For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been…

Interpretable part-prototype models are computer vision models that are explainable by design. The models learn prototypical parts and recognise these components in an image, thereby combining classification and explanation. Despite the…

One of the major hurdles toward automatic semantic understanding of computer programs is the lack of knowledge about what constitutes functional equivalence of code segments. We postulate that a sound knowledgebase can be used to…

Background: Previous research highlights that common misconceptions about developer productivity lead to harmful and inaccurate evaluations of software work, pointing to the need for organizations to differentiate between measures of…