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Measuring software complexity plays an important role to meet the demands of complex software. The cyclomatic complexity is one of most used and renowned metric among the other three proposed and researched metrics that are namely: Line of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-12-22 Ankita Garg

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Wei Ma , Zhihao Lin , Shangqing Liu , Qiang Hu , Ye Liu , Wenhan Wang , Cen Zhang , Liming Nie , Li Li , Yang Liu , Lingxiao Jiang

Context: Code annotations have gained widespread popularity in programming languages, offering developers the ability to attach metadata to code elements to define custom behaviors. Many modern frameworks and APIs use annotations to keep…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Eduardo Guerra , Everaldo Gomes , Jeferson Ferreira , Igor Wiese , Phyllipe Lima , Marco Gerosa , Paulo Meirelles

Code metrics have been widely used to estimate software maintenance effort. Metrics have generally been used to guide developer effort to reduce or avoid future maintenance burdens. Size is the simplest and most widely deployed metric. The…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Shaiful Alam Chowdhury , Gias Uddin , Reid Holmes

Decomposition and abstraction is an essential component of computational thinking, yet it is not always emphasized in introductory programming courses. In addition, as generative AI further reduces the focus on syntax and increases the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Georgiana Haldeman , Peter Ohmann , Paul Denny

Previous works from research and industry have proposed a spatial representation of code in a canvas, arguing that a navigational code space confers developers the freedom to organise elements according to their understanding. By allowing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Abir Bouraffa , Gian-Luca Fuhrmann , Walid Maalej

Objectives: This study aims to investigate the readability and understandability of bitwise operators in programming, with the main hypothesis that there will be a difference in the performance metrics (response time and error rate) between…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Shubham Joshi

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly adopted for programming work. Prior work shows that while LLMs accelerate task completion for professional programmers, beginning programmers struggle to prompt models effectively.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Yangtian Zi , Luisa Li , Arjun Guha , Carolyn Jane Anderson , Molly Q Feldman

The code review comment (CRC) is pivotal in the process of modern code review. It provides reviewers with the opportunity to identify potential bugs, offer constructive feedback, and suggest improvements. Clear and concise code review…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Junkai Chen , Zhenhao Li , Qiheng Mao , Xing Hu , Kui Liu , Xin Xia

Background: Modern Code Review (MCR) is a key component for delivering high-quality software and sharing knowledge among developers. Effective reviews require an in-depth understanding of the code and demand from the reviewers to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Michael Unterkalmsteiner , Deepika Badampudi , Ricardo Britto , Nauman bin Ali

Computational notebooks are the primary coding tools for data scientists, but their code quality remains understudied and often poor. Given the importance of maintainability and reusability, enhancing code understandability is essential.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Mojtaba Mostafavi Ghahfarokhi , Alireza Asadi , Arash Asgari , Bardia Mohammadi , Abbas Heydarnoori , Masih Beigi Rizi

Understanding code represents a core ability needed for automating software development tasks. While foundation models like LLMs show impressive results across many software engineering challenges, the extent of their true semantic…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Serge Lionel Nikiema , Jordan Samhi , Abdoul Kader Kaboré , Jacques Klein , Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

Recent AI code assistants have significantly improved their ability to process more complex contexts and generate entire codebases based on a textual description, compared to the popular snippet-level generation. These codebase AI…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Philipp Eibl , Sadra Sabouri , Souti Chattopadhyay

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit strong reasoning abilities, often attributed to their capacity to generate chain-of-thought-style intermediate reasoning. Recent work suggests that exposure to code can further enhance these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Lukas Twist , Shu Yang , Hanqi Yan , Jingzhi Gong , Di Wang , Helen Yannakoudakis , Jie M. Zhang

Predicting the runtime complexity of a programming code is an arduous task. In fact, even for humans, it requires a subtle analysis and comprehensive knowledge of algorithms to predict time complexity with high fidelity, given any code. As…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Jagriti Sikka , Kushal Satya , Yaman Kumar , Shagun Uppal , Rajiv Ratn Shah , Roger Zimmermann

Reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a crucial ability, especially in complex decision-making tasks. One significant task to show LLMs' reasoning capability is code time complexity prediction, which involves various…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Seung-Yeop Baik , Joonghyuk Hahn , Jungin Kim , Mingi Jeon , Aditi , Yo-Sub Han , Sang-Ki Ko

Understanding an unfamiliar codebase is an essential task for developers in various scenarios, such as during the onboarding process. Especially when the codebase is large and time is limited, achieving a decent level of comprehension…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Jie Gao , Yue Xue , Xiaofei Xie , SoeMin Thant , Erika Lee , Bowen Xu

AI-assisted development tools promise productivity gains and improved code quality, yet their adoption among developers remains inconsistent. Prior research suggests that professional expertise influences technology adoption, but its role…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ilya Zakharov , Ekaterina Koshchenko , Agnia Sergeyuk

Novice programmers often struggle to comprehend code due to vague naming, deep nesting, and poor structural organization. While explanations may offer partial support, they typically do not restructure the code itself. We propose code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Subarna Saha , Alif Al Hasan , Fariha Tanjim Shifat , Mia Mohammad Imran

Reduce and control complexity is an essential practice in software design. Cyclomatic complexity (CC) is one of the most popular software metrics, applied for more than 40 years. Despite CC is an interesting metric to highlight the number…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Hugo Tremblay , Fabio Petrillo