Related papers: Source Code Comprehension: A Contemporary Definiti…

In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a…

Qualitative data analysis provides insight into the underlying perceptions and experiences within unstructured data. However, the time-consuming nature of the coding process, especially for larger datasets, calls for innovative approaches,…

Code summarization provides a high level natural language description of the function performed by code, as it can benefit the software maintenance, code categorization and retrieval. To the best of our knowledge, most state-of-the-art…

In response to the prevailing challenges in contemporary software development, this article introduces an innovative approach to code augmentation centered around Impermanent Identifiers. The primary goal is to enhance the software…

Source code summarization is the task of writing natural language descriptions of source code. A typical use case is generating short summaries of subroutines for use in API documentation. The heart of almost all current research into code…

(Source) Code summarization aims to automatically generate summaries/comments for a given code snippet in the form of natural language. Such summaries play a key role in helping developers understand and maintain source code. Existing code…

Understanding an unfamiliar codebase is an essential task for developers in various scenarios, such as during the onboarding process. Especially when the codebase is large and time is limited, achieving a decent level of comprehension…

While a large number of pre-trained models of source code have been successfully developed and applied to a variety of software engineering (SE) tasks in recent years, our understanding of these pre-trained models is arguably fairly…

Novice programmers face numerous barriers while attempting to learn how to code that may deter them from pursuing a computer science degree or career in software development. In this work, we propose a tool concept to address the…

Effective software testing is critical for producing reliable and secure software, yet many computer science students struggle to master the foundational concepts required to construct comprehensive test suites. While automated feedback…

Code reuse is a widespread practice across software development projects, suggesting an inherent trust in the reused code. Yet, there is a lack of a fundamental understanding of developers' trust and how various factors mold their…

A fundamental unit of work in programming is the code contribution ("commit") that a developer makes to the code base of the project in work. An author's commit frequency describes how often that author commits. Knowing the distribution of…

It can be insightful to extend qualitative studies with a secondary quantitative analysis (where the former suggests insightful questions that the latter can answer). Documenting developer beliefs should be the start, not the end, of…

Transformer-based pre-trained models have recently achieved great results in solving many software engineering tasks including automatic code completion which is a staple in a developer's toolkit. While many have striven to improve the…

Code coverage is a widely used metric for quantifying the extent to which program elements, such as statements or branches, are executed during testing. Calculating code coverage is resource-intensive, requiring code building and execution…

Measuring code understandability is both highly relevant and exceptionally challenging. This paper proposes a dynamic code understandability assessment method, which estimates a personalized code understandability score from the perspective…

Code summarization generates brief natural language descriptions of source code pieces, which can assist developers in understanding code and reduce documentation workload. Recent neural models on code summarization are trained and…

Understanding and reasoning about code semantics is essential for enhancing code LLMs' abilities to solve real-world software engineering (SE) tasks. Although several code reasoning benchmarks exist, most rely on synthetic datasets or…

Software development is a complex activity which depends on diverse technologies and people's expertise. The approaches to developing software highly depend on these different characteristics, which are the context developers are subject…

Reliable effort estimation remains an ongoing challenge to software engineers. Accurate effort estimation is the state of art of software engineering, effort estimation of software is the preliminary phase between the client and the…