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Developers use tools such as GitHub pull requests to review code, discuss proposed changes, and request modifications. While changed files are commonly presented in alphabetical order, this does not necessarily coincide with the reviewer's…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Abir Bouraffa , Carolin Brandt , Andy Zaidmann , Walid Maalej

This paper investigates the factors influencing programmers' adoption of AI-generated JavaScript code recommendations within the context of lightweight, function-level programming tasks. It extends prior research by (1) utilizing objective…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Changwen Li , Christoph Treude , Ofir Turel

Software technologies are used by programmers with diverse backgrounds. To fulfill programmers' need for information, enthusiasts contribute numerous learning resources that vary in style and content, which act as documentation for the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Deeksha M. Arya , Jin L. C. Guo , Martin P. Robillard

High-quality software products rely on both well-written source code and timely detection and thorough reporting of bugs. However, some programmers view bug reports as negative assessments of their work, leading them to withhold reporting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Vitaly Alifanov , Kamil Almetov , Ivan Kornienko , Arsen Mutalapov , Yegor Bugayenko

Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Kathrin Figl , Maria Kirchner , Sebastian Baltes , Michael Felderer

With the advent and proliferation of online developer forums as informal documentation, developers often share their opinions about the APIs they use. Thus, opinions of others often shape the developer's perception and decisions related to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Gias Uddin , Olga Baysal , Latifa Guerrouj , Foutse Khomh

Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Danilo Silva , Nikolaos Tsantalis , Marco Tulio Valente

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a form of Technical Debt where developers document the debt using source code comments (SATD-C) or issues (SATD-I). However, it is still unclear the circumstances that drive developers to choose one or…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Laerte Xavier , João Eduardo Montandon , Marco Tulio Valente

GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Abir Bouraffa , Yen Dieu Pham , Walid Maalej

AI code generation tools have gained significant popularity among developers, who use them to assist in software development due to their capability to generate code. Existing studies mainly explored the quality, e.g., correctness and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Syed Mohammad Kashif , Peng Liang , Amjed Tahir

AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kexin Sun , Hongyu Kuang , Sebastian Baltes , Xin Zhou , He Zhang , Xiaoxing Ma , Guoping Rong , Dong Shao , Christoph Treude

Developers use and contribute to repositories on GitHub. Documentation present in the repositories serves as an important source by helping developers to understand, maintain and contribute to the project. Currently, documentation in a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla , Sridhar Chimalakonda

Code reviews are central for software quality assurance. Ideally, reviewers should explain their feedback to enable authors of code changes to understand the feedback and act accordingly. Different developers might need different…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Ratnadira Widyasari , Ting Zhang , Abir Bouraffa , Walid Maalej , David Lo

Software is infamous for its poor quality and frequent occurrence of bugs. While there is no doubt that thorough testing is an appropriate answer to ensure sufficient quality, the poor state of software generally suggests that developers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Philipp Straubinger , Gordon Fraser

Code maintenance data sets typically consist of a before and after version of the code that contains the improvement or fix. Such data sets are important for software engineering support tools related to code maintenance, such as program…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-27 Henry Tang , Sarah Nadi

Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Pooja Rani

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian D. Newman , Ali Ouni

Documenting frameworks provides its users and maintainers useful information on that software's architecture, design, and customization. Despite documentation's importance, the process of creating and maintaining it is considered to imply…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-29 João Santos , Filipe Correia

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

Comments are very useful to the flow of code development. With the increasing commonality of code, novice coders have been creating a significant amount of codebases. Due to lack of commenting standards, their comments are often useless,…