Related papers: Repeated Builds During Code Review: An Empirical S…

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…

Sampling diverse programs from a code language model and reranking with model likelihood is a popular method for code generation but it is prone to preferring degenerate solutions. Inspired by collaborative programming, we propose…

Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…

Context: Contemporary software development organizations lack diversity and the ratios of women in Free and open-source software (FOSS) communities are even lower than the industry average. Although the results of recent studies hint the…

Instrumenting programs for performing run-time checking of properties, such as regular shapes, is a common and useful technique that helps programmers detect incorrect program behaviors. This is specially true in dynamic languages such as…

Modern code review is a critical quality assurance process that is widely adopted in both industry and open source software environments. This process can help newcomers learn from the feedback of experienced reviewers; however, it often…

Software developers often submit questions to technical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow (SO) to resolve code-level problems. In practice, they include example code snippets with questions to explain the programming issues. Existing research…

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…

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…

The two most significant bottlenecks in code merging are the build process and the unit tests. However, as the number of items to be checked in a code review increases, that code review becomes a bottleneck for code merging as well. Because…

As modern software extensively uses open source packages, developers regularly pull in new upstream code through frequent updates. While a manual review of all upstream changes may not be practical, developers may rely on the authors' and…

Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code by changing its internal structure without affecting its external behaviour, with the main aims of improving the quality of software product. Therefore, there is a belief…

Several techniques have been proposed to automate code review. Early support consisted in recommending the most suited reviewer for a given change or in prioritizing the review tasks. With the advent of deep learning in software…

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…

As developers program and debug, they continuously edit and run their code, a behavior known as edit-run cycles. While techniques such as live programming are intended to support this behavior, little is known about the characteristics of…

Software redesign preserves functionality while improving quality attributes, but manual reuse of code and tests is costly and error-prone, especially in crossrepository redesigns. Focusing on static analyzers where cross-repo redesign…

Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up…

Background: Sub-optimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers may write low-quality code due to many reasons, such as lack of technical knowledge, lack of experience, time pressure, management decisions, and even unhappiness.…

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…