Related papers: Exploring the Advances in Identifying Useful Code …

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…

Code review is a widespread practice to improve software quality and transfer knowledge. It is often seen as time-consuming due to the need for manual effort and potential delays. Several AI-assisted tools, such as Qodo, GitHub Copilot, and…

Descriptive comments play a crucial role in the software engineering process. They decrease development time, enable better bug detection, and facilitate the reuse of previously written code. However, comments are commonly the last of a…

Peer review is the main mechanism by which the software engineering community assesses the quality of scientific results. However, the rapid growth of paper submissions in software engineering venues has outpaced the availability of…

Code maintenance data sets typically consist of a before and after version of the code that contains the improvement or fix. Such data sets are important for software engineering support tools related to code maintenance, such as program…

Natural language comments convey key aspects of source code such as implementation, usage, and pre- and post-conditions. Failure to update comments accordingly when the corresponding code is modified introduces inconsistencies, which is…

Context: Code reviews are essential for maintaining software quality, yet many human review comments suffer from issues such as redundancy, vagueness, or lack of constructiveness. These types of comments may slow down feedback and obscure…

Documenting the functionality of software units with code comments, e.g., Javadoc comments, is a common programmer best-practice in software engineering. This paper introduces a novel test generation technique that exploits the code-comment…

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…

In the pull-based development model, code contributions are submitted as pull requests (PRs) to undergo reviews and approval by other developers with the goal of being merged into the code base. A PR can be supported by a description, whose…

Software testing plays a crucial role in the contribution process of open-source projects. For example, contributions introducing new features are expected to include tests, and contributions with tests are more likely to be accepted.…

Context: Writing Clean Code understandable by other collaborators has become crucial to enhancing collaboration and productivity. However, very little is known regarding whether developers agree with Clean Code Principles and how they apply…

Software security vulnerabilities can lead to severe consequences, making early detection essential. Although code review serves as a critical defense mechanism against security flaws, relevant feedback remains scarce due to limited…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been used by students as a low-cost and low-touch educational credential in a variety of fields. Understanding the grading mechanisms behind these course assignments is important for evaluating MOOC…

Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…

Despite the maturity already achieved by recommender systems algorithms, little is known about how to obtain and provide users with a proper rationale for a recommendation. Transparency and effectiveness of recommender systems may be…

This study considers inspection conducted in software development PBL as learning feedback and investigates the impact of each inspection comment on students. The authors have already collected most inspection comments for not only…

Comments in software are critical for maintenance and reuse. But apart from prescriptive advice, there is little practical support or quantitative understanding of what makes a comment useful. In this paper, we introduce the task of…

There are two ways to check if a program is correct, namely execute it or review it. While executing a program is the ultimate test for its correctness reviewing the program can occur earlier in its development and find problems if done…

Comment updating is an emerging task in software evolution that aims to automatically revise source code comments in accordance with code changes. This task plays a vital role in maintaining code-comment consistency throughout software…