Related papers: Modern code reviews -- Preliminary results of a sy…
We describe two pilot studies of code review by and for scientists. Our principal findings are that scientists are enthusiastic, but need to be shown code review in action, and that just-in-time review of small code changes is more likely…
Objective: Systematic reviews of scholarly documents often provide complete and exhaustive summaries of literature relevant to a research question. However, well-done systematic reviews are expensive, time-demanding, and labor-intensive.…
Software development projects involve the use of a wide range of tools to produce a software artifact. Software repositories such as source control systems have become a focus for emergent research because they are a source of rich…
Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…
Causal analysis has become an essential component in understanding the underlying causes of phenomena across various fields. Despite its significance, existing literature on causal discovery algorithms is fragmented, with inconsistent…
With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…
Scientific software-defined as computer programs, scripts, or code used in scientific research, data analysis, modeling, or simulation-has become central to modern research. However, there is limited research on the readability and…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
Context: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) uses scenarios written in semi-structured natural language to express software requirements in a way that can be understood by all stakeholders. The resulting natural language specifications can…
When estimating causal effects using observational data, it is desirable to replicate a randomized experiment as closely as possible by obtaining treated and control groups with similar covariate distributions. This goal can often be…
The vast majority of research in computer assisted medical coding focuses on coding at the document level, but a substantial proportion of medical coding in the real world involves coding at the level of clinical encounters, each of which…
Background: Research software is crucial for enabling research discoveries and supporting data analysis, simulation, and interpretation across domains. However, evolving requirements, complex inputs, and legacy dependencies hinder the…
Regression testing is an essential activity to assure that software code changes do not adversely affect existing functionalities. With the wide adoption of Continuous Integration (CI) in software projects, which increases the frequency of…
The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) has drawn growing interest within the scientific community. LLMs can handle large volumes of textual data and support methods for evidence synthesis. Although recent studies highlight the potential of…
Context: Software programs can be written in different but functionally equivalent ways. Even though previous research has compared specific formatting elements to find out which alternatives affect code legibility, seeing the bigger…
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…
Conducting a systematic review (SR) is comprised of multiple tasks: (i) collect documents (studies) that are likely to be relevant from digital libraries (eg., PubMed), (ii) manually read and label the documents as relevant or irrelevant,…
The application of code clone technology accelerates code search, improves code reuse efficiency, and assists in software quality assessment and code vulnerability detection. However, the application of code clones also introduces software…
Log data provides crucial insights for tasks like monitoring, root cause analysis, and anomaly detection. Due to the vast volume of logs, automated log parsing is essential to transform semi-structured log messages into structured…
Code review is a standard practice for ensuring the quality of software projects, and recent research has focused extensively on automated code review. While significant advancements have been made in generating code reviews, the automated…