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Production deployment of AI coding agents requires fast, reproducible evaluation signals. Existing industrial practices trade off speed and fidelity: online A/B testing takes weeks and risks user experience, shadow deployment yields signals…

Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice where developers frequently integrate code into a common codebase. After the code is integrated, the CI server runs a test suite and other tools to produce a set of reports (e.g., output…

The rise of large language models for code has reshaped software development. Autonomous coding agents, able to create branches, open pull requests, and perform code reviews, now actively contribute to real-world projects. Their growing…

Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far,…

Code review is central to software engineering education but hard to scale in capstone projects due to tight deadlines, uneven peer feedback, and limited prior experience. We investigate an LLM-as-reviewer integrated directly into GitHub…

We introduce Cargo Scan, the first interactive program analysis tool designed to help developers audit third-party Rust code. Real systems written in Rust rely on thousands of transitive dependencies. These dependencies are as dangerous in…

Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior while improving its internal structure. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and…

We aim to explore how developers document their refactoring activities during the software life cycle. We call such activity Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR), which indicates developers' documentation of their refactoring activities. SAR is…

Code reviews are an integral part of software development and have been recognized as a crucial practice for minimizing bugs and favouring higher code quality. They serve as an important checkpoint before committing code and play an…

This article presents a study on the quality and execution of research code from publicly-available replication datasets at the Harvard Dataverse repository. Research code is typically created by a group of scientists and published together…

Developers often refactor source code to improve its quality during software development. A challenge in refactoring is to determine if it can be applied or not. To help with this decision-making process, we aim to search for past…

Developers interrupting their participation in a project might slowly forget critical information about the code, such as its intended purpose, structure, the impact of external dependencies, and the approach used for implementation.…

Modern code review is a process in which an incremental code contribution made by a code author is reviewed by one or more peers before it is committed to the version control system. An important element of modern code review is verifying…

As software development practices increasingly adopt AI-powered tools, ensuring that such tools can support secure coding has become critical. This study evaluates the effectiveness of GitHub Copilot's recently introduced code review…

To create unit tests, it may be necessary to refactor the production code, e.g. by widening access to specific methods or by decomposing classes into smaller units that are easier to test independently. We report on an extensive study to…

Open source projects often maintain open bug repositories during development and maintenance, and the reporters often point out straightly or implicitly the reasons why bugs occur when they submit them. The comments about a bug are very…

Software reuse is a crucial external quality attribute targeted by open-source and commercial projects. Despite that software reuse has experienced an increased adoption throughout the years, little is known about what aspects of code reuse…

As modern software extensively uses free open source packages as dependencies, developers have to regularly pull in new third-party code through frequent updates. However, without a proper review of every incoming change, vulnerable and…

During the software lifecycle, a program can evolve several times for different reasons such as the optimisation of a bottle-neck, the refactoring of an obscure function, etc. These code changes often involve several functions or modules,…