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GitHub is one of the most widely used public code development platform. However, the code hosted publicly on the platform is vulnerable to commit spoofing that allows an adversary to introduce malicious code or commits into the repository…

Machine Learning software documentation is different from most of the documentations that were studied in software engineering research. Often, the users of these documentations are not software experts. The increasing interest in using…

Code review is an important quality assurance activity for software development. Code review discussions among developers and maintainers can be heated and sometimes involve personal attacks and unnecessary disrespectful comments,…

Software documentation guides the proper use of tools or services. With the rapid growth of machine learning libraries, individuals from various fields are incorporating machine learning into their workflows through programming. However,…

A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…

Emotions play a significant role in teamwork and collaborative activities like software development. While researchers have analyzed developer emotions in various software artifacts (e.g., issues, pull requests), few studies have focused on…

Appropriate comments of code snippets provide insight for code functionality, which are helpful for program comprehension. However, due to the great cost of authoring with the comments, many code projects do not contain adequate comments.…

A "privacy behavior" in software is an action where the software uses personal information for a service or a feature, such as a website using location to provide content relevant to a user. Programmers are required by regulations or…

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…

Technical debt (TD) describes the additional costs that emerge when developers have opted for a quick and easy solution to a problem, rather than a more effective and well-designed, but time-consuming approach. Self-Admitted Technical Debts…

Python is one of the fastest-growing programming languages and currently ranks as the top language in many lists, even recently overtaking JavaScript as the top language on GitHub. Given its importance in data science and machine learning,…

This paper aims to explore fundamental questions in the era when AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot are widely adopted: what do developers truly value and criticize in AI coding assistants, and what does this reveal about their needs…

Primitive types are fundamental components available in any programming language, which serve as the building blocks of data manipulation. Understanding the role of these types in source code is essential to write software. Little work has…

Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…

This paper discusses spreadsheets documentation and new means to achieve this end by using Excel's built-in "Comment" function. By structuring comments, they can be used as an essential tool to fully explain spreadsheet. This will greatly…

Software updates are critical to the performance, compatibility, and security of software systems. However, users do not always install updates, leaving their machines vulnerable to attackers' exploits. While recent studies have highlighted…

In software development and maintenance, code comments can help developers understand source code, and improve communication among developers. However, developers sometimes neglect to update the corresponding comment when changing the code,…

Logging plays a crucial role in software engineering because it is key to perform various tasks including debugging, performance analysis, and detection of anomalies. Despite the importance of log data, the practice of logging still suffers…

Academic publications have been evaluated in terms of their impact on research communities based on many metrics, such as the number of citations. On the other hand, the impact of academic publications on industry has been rarely studied.…

Coding agents have received significant adoption in software development recently. Unlike traditional LLM-based code completion tools, coding agents work with autonomy (e.g., invoking external tools) and leave visible traces in software…