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For a novice programmer, coding is equivalent to a nightmare. A novice programmer tries to replicate steps provided by the faculty and on compilation gets a number of errors which the novice programmer is not able to resolve. This system…

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly adopted in the software engineering domain, yet the robustness of their grasp on core software design concepts remains unclear. We conduct an empirical study to systematically evaluate…

In our research, we investigate the challenges that software engineers face during program comprehension, particularly when debugging unfamiliar codebases. We propose a novel tool, CodeCompass, to address these issues. Our study highlights…

Quality aspects such as ethics, fairness, and transparency have been proven to be essential for trustworthy software systems. Explainability has been identified not only as a means to achieve all these three aspects in systems, but also as…

In the context of image classification, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) first embed images into a set of human-understandable concepts, followed by an intrinsically interpretable classifier that predicts labels based on these intermediate…

In any sufficiently complex software system there are experts, having a deeper understanding of parts of the system than others. However, it is not always clear who these experts are and which particular parts of the system they can provide…

Context and Motivation: Due to their increasing complexity, everyday software systems are becoming increasingly opaque for users. A frequently adopted method to address this difficulty is explainability, which aims to make systems more…

Many students in introductory programming courses fare poorly in the code writing tasks of the final summative assessment. Such tasks are designed to assess whether novices have developed the analytical skills to translate from the given…

Cognitive-Driven Development (CDD) is a coding design technique that helps developers focus on designing code within cognitive limits. The imposed limit tends to enhance code readability and maintainability. While early works on CDD focused…

To avoid software vulnerabilities, organizations are shifting security to earlier stages of the software development, such as at code review time. In this paper, we aim to understand the developers' perspective on assessing software…

As pervasive data collection and powerful algorithms increasingly shape children's experience of the world and each other, their ability to interrogate computational algorithms has become crucially important. A growing body of work has…

Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…

Code comprehension and analysis of open-source project codebases is a task frequently performed by developers and researchers. However, existing tools that practitioners use for assistance with such tasks often require prior project setup,…

Software reliability is critical in ensuring that the digital systems we depend on function correctly. In software development, increasing software reliability often involves testing. However, for complex and critical systems, developers…

When programming resource-scarce embedded smart devices, the designer often requires both the low-level system programming features of a language such as C and higher level capability typical of a language like Java. The choice of a…

Software design techniques are undoubtedly crucial in the process of designing good software. Over the years, a large number of design techniques have been proposed by both researchers and practitioners. Unfortunately, despite their…

Reading, understanding and explaining code have traditionally been important skills for novices learning programming. As large language models (LLMs) become prevalent, these foundational skills are more important than ever given the…

Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…

Real-world programs are neither monolithic nor static -- they are constructed using platform and third party libraries, and both programs and libraries continuously evolve in response to change pressure. In case of the Java language, rules…

Coding agents are rapidly changing the landscape of software development, moving from inline completion to autonomous systems that edit repositories, open pull requests, respond to issues, and run scheduled or webhook triggered routines…