Related papers: Method Chaining Redux: An Empirical Study of Metho…
Improved test case prioritization means that software developers can detect and fix more software faults sooner than usual. But is there one "best" prioritization algorithm? Or do different kinds of projects deserve special kinds of…
AI-based code assistants are promising tools that can facilitate and speed up code development. They exploit machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to interact with developers, suggesting code snippets (e.g., method…
The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…
Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…
Context: software projects are common resources in Software Engineering experiments, although these are often selected without following a specific strategy, which reduces the representativeness and replication of the results. An option is…
Sometimes debates on programming languages are more religious than scientific. Questions about which language is more succinct or efficient, or makes developers more productive are discussed with fervor, and their answers are too often…
The array is a data structure used in a wide range of programs. Its compact storage and constant time random access makes it highly efficient, but arbitrary indexing complicates the analysis of code containing array accesses. Such analyses…
The use of programming languages such as Java and C in Open Source Software (OSS) has been well studied. However, many other popular languages such as XSL or XML have received minor attention. In this paper, we discuss some trends in OSS…
Many internal software metrics and external quality attributes of Java programs correlate strongly with program size. This knowledge has been used pervasively in quantitative studies of software through practices such as normalization on…
In object-oriented programming, it is reasonable to hypothesize that smaller classes with fewer methods are less complex. Should this hypothesis hold true, it would be advisable for programmers to design classes with fewer methods, as…
Context: Modern software systems (e.g., Apache Spark) are usually written in multiple programming languages (PLs). There is little understanding on the phenomenon of multi-programming-language commits (MPLCs), which involve modified source…
Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…
Decisions on which classes to refactor are fraught with difficulty. The problem of identifying candidate classes becomes acute when confronted with large systems comprising hundreds or thousands of classes. In this paper, we describe a…
Unit testing is an essential part of the software development process, which helps to identify issues with source code in early stages of development and prevent regressions. Machine learning has emerged as viable approach to help software…
A large-scale evaluation for current naming approaches substantiates that such approaches are accurate. However, it is less known about which categories of method names work well via such naming approaches and how's the performance of…
We analyse the time evolution of two open source Java projects: Eclipse and Netbeans, both developed following agile practices, though to a different extent. Our study is centered on quality analysis of the systems, measured as defects…
Software security is undoubtedly a major concern in today's software engineering. Although the level of awareness of security issues is often high, practical experiences show that neither preventive actions nor reactions to possible issues…
This article presents an empirical study of how the use of relational database access technologies in open source Java projects evolves over time. Our observations may be useful to project managers to make more informed decisions on which…
This paper presents a large-scale study that investigates the bug resolution characteristics among popular Github projects written in different programming languages. We explore correlations but, of course, we cannot infer causation.…
Using libraries in applications has helped developers reduce the costs of reinventing already existing code. However, an increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch…