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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.…

Machine learning models are essential tools in various domains, but their performance can degrade over time due to changes in data distribution or other factors. On one hand, detecting and addressing such degradations is crucial for…

Our goal is procedural text comprehension, namely tracking how the properties of entities (e.g., their location) change with time given a procedural text (e.g., a paragraph about photosynthesis, a recipe). This task is challenging as the…

Code review is a key practice in software engineering, ensuring quality and collaboration. However, industrial Merge Request (MR) workflows often deviate from standardized review processes, with many MRs serving non-review purposes (e.g.,…

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…

The software development community has been using code quality metrics for the last five decades. Despite their wide adoption, code quality metrics have attracted a fair share of criticism. In this paper, first, we carry out a qualitative…

Existing performance measures rank delineation algorithms inconsistently, which makes it difficult to decide which one is best in any given situation. We show that these inconsistencies stem from design flaws that make the metrics…

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…

Test or prove? These two approaches to software verification have long been presented as opposites. One is dynamic, the other static: a test executes the program, a proof only analyzes the program text. A different perspective is emerging,…

Reference models convey best practices and standards. The reference frameworks necessitate conformance checks to ensure adherence to established guidelines and principles, which is crucial for maintaining quality and consistency in various…

Context. The adoption of Machine Learning (ML)--enabled systems is steadily increasing. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of ML-specific quality assurance approaches, possibly because of the limited knowledge of how quality-related concerns…

Security code review is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process typically requiring integration with automated security defect detection tools. However, existing security analysis tools struggle with poor generalization, high false…

Reliable and robust evaluation methods are a necessary first step towards developing machine learning models that are themselves robust and reliable. Unfortunately, current evaluation protocols typically used to assess classifiers fail to…

For large software applications, running the whole test suite after each code change is time- and resource-intensive. Regression test selection techniques aim at reducing test execution time by selecting only the tests that are affected by…

Recent papers have introduced a novel approach to explain why a Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) model for outcome-oriented predictions provides wrong predictions. Moreover, they have shown how to exploit the explanations, obtained using…

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental part of extracting information from documents in biomedical applications. A notable advantage of NER is its consistency in extracting biomedical entities in a document context. Although…

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…

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,…

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…