Related papers: Do code refactorings influence the merge effort?

With the rapid development of deep learning, the implementation of intricate algorithms and substantial data processing have become standard elements of deep learning projects. As a result, the code has become progressively complex as the…

To satisfy varying customer needs, device vendors and OS providers often rely on the open-source nature of the Android OS and offer customized versions of the Android OS. When a new version of the Android OS is released, device vendors and…

Refactoring is a critical process in software development, aiming at improving the internal structure of code while preserving its external behavior. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments…

In modern software engineering, build systems play the crucial role of facilitating the conversion of source code into software artifacts. Recent research has explored high-level causes of build failures, but has largely overlooked the…

GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…

Advances in technologies like artificial intelligence and metaverse have led to a proliferation of software systems in business and everyday life. With this widespread penetration, the carbon emissions of software are rapidly growing as…

Background: Despite a growing body of literature on the impact of software bots on open source software development teams, their effects on team communication, coordination, and collaboration practices are not well understood. Bots can have…

Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice to improve the understandability and maintainability of the source code. The Extract Method refactoring is considered as "Swiss army knife" of refactorings,…

[Background:] Software effort prediction methods and models typically assume positive correlation between software product complexity and development effort. However, conflicting observations, i.e. negative correlation between product…

One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

[Background] Refactoring has matured over the past twenty years to become part of a developer's toolkit. However, many fundamental research questions still remain largely unexplored. [Aim] The goal of this paper is to investigate the…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

Peer code review and continuous integration often interleave with each other in the modern software quality management. Although several studies investigate how non-technical factors (e.g., reviewer workload), developer participation and…

A version control system, such as Git, requires a way to integrate changes from different developers or branches. Given a merge scenario, a merge tool either outputs a clean integration of the changes, or it outputs a conflict for manual…

Catalogs of refactoring have key importance in software maintenance and evolution, since developers rely on such documents to understand and perform refactoring operations. Furthermore, these catalogs constitute a reference guide for…

Software development agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Agent, Devin, and OpenAI Codex are being increasingly integrated into developer workflows. While prior work has evaluated agent capabilities for code completion and…

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…

Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the…

Open-source developers, particularly the elite developers, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They do not only commit source code but also spend a significant amount of effort on other communicative, organizational,…