Related papers: Early Career Developers' Perceptions of Code Under…

Algorithms play a crucial role in many technological systems that control or affect various aspects of our lives. As a result, providing explanations for their decisions to address the needs of users and organisations is increasingly…

Software comprehension can be extremely time-consuming due to the ever-growing size of codebases. Consequently, there is an increasing need to accelerate the code comprehension process to facilitate maintenance and reduce associated costs.…

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without…

Although writing code seems trivial at times, problems arise when humans misinterpret what the code actually does. One of the potential causes are "atoms of confusion", the smallest possible patterns of misinterpretable source code.…

Human-centered explainability has become a critical foundation for the responsible development of interactive information systems, where users must be able to understand, interpret, and scrutinize AI-driven outputs to make informed…

Code reasoning tasks are becoming prevalent in large language model (LLM) assessments. Yet, there is a dearth of studies on the impact of real-world complexities on code reasoning, e.g., inter- or intra-procedural dependencies, API calls,…

Cognitive biases appear during code review. They significantly impact the creation of feedback and how it is interpreted by developers. These biases can lead to illogical reasoning and decision-making, violating one of the main hypotheses…

Modern software systems are becoming increasingly complex and opaque. The integration of explanations within software has shown the potential to address this opacity and can make the system more understandable to end-users. As a result,…

Learning-based techniques, especially advanced pre-trained models for code have demonstrated capabilities in code understanding and generation, solving diverse software engineering (SE) tasks. Despite the promising results, current training…

Developers play a central role in determining how machine learning systems are explained in practice, yet they are rarely trained to design explanations for non-technical audiences. Despite this, transparency and explainability requirements…

Understanding factors that influence software development velocity is crucial for engineering teams and organizations, yet empirical evidence at scale remains limited. A more robust understanding of the dynamics of cycle time may help…

Understanding program code is a complicated endeavor. As such, myriad different factors can influence the outcome. Investigations of program comprehension, and in particular those using controlled experiments, have to take these factors…

Background: Recent advancements in large language models have motivated the practical use of such models in code generation and program synthesis. However, little is known about the effects of such tools on code readability and visual…

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…

Software analytics has been the subject of considerable recent attention but is yet to receive significant industry traction. One of the key reasons is that software practitioners are reluctant to trust predictions produced by the analytics…

Formal explainability guarantees the rigor of computed explanations, and so it is paramount in domains where rigor is critical, including those deemed high-risk. Unfortunately, since its inception formal explainability has been hampered by…

Knowledge about the roles developers play in a software project is crucial to understanding the project's collaborative dynamics. Developers are often classified according to the dichotomy of core and peripheral roles. Typically,…

Large Language Models have shown impressive capabilities in coding tasks like code generation and code completion, as they have been trained on a large amount of code data. Also, since one of the core pretraining objectives is Next Token…

Software is among the most complex endeavors of the human mind; large scale systems can have tens of millions of lines of source code. However, seldom is complexity measured above the lowest level of code, and sometimes source code files or…

[Context] Applying design principles has long been acknowledged as beneficial for understanding and maintainability in traditional software projects. These benefits may similarly hold for Machine Learning (ML) projects, which involve…