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Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in software engineering (SE) tools, powering applications such as code generation, automated code review, and bug triage. As these LLM-based AI for Software Engineering (AI4SE) systems…
Researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of human aspects in software development. Since qualitative methods are used to explore human behavior in-depth, we believe that studies using such methods will become more common.…
Naming is very important in software development, as names are often the only vehicle of meaning about what the code is intended to do. A recent study on how developers choose names collected the names given by different developers for the…
To improve software developers' productivity has been the holy grail of software engineering research. But before we can claim to have improved it, we must first be able to measure productivity. This is far from trivial. In fact, two…
Background: The development of scientific software applications is far from trivial, due to the constant increase in the necessary complexity of these applications, their increasing size, and their need for intensive maintenance and reuse.…
To develop rigorous knowledge about ML models -- and the systems in which they are embedded -- we need reliable measurements. But reliable measurement is fundamentally challenging, and touches on issues of reproducibility, scalability,…
Sentiment Analysis (SA) refers to a family of techniques at the crossroads of statistics, natural language processing, and computational linguistics. The primary goal is to detect the semantic orientation of individual opinions and comments…
Industry practitioners care about small improvements in malware detection accuracy because their models are deployed to hundreds of millions of machines, meaning a 0.1\% change can cause an overwhelming number of false positives. However,…
Context: Systematic reviews (SRs) summarize state-of-the-art evidence in science, including software engineering (SE). Objective: Our objective is to evaluate how SRs report research artifacts and to provide a comprehensive list of these…
In recent years, the need for neutral benchmark studies that focus on the comparison of methods from computational sciences has been increasingly recognised by the scientific community. While general advice on the design and analysis of…
Software engineering (SE) research should be relevant to industrial practice. There have been regular discussions in the SE community on this issue since the 1980's, led by pioneers such as Robert Glass. As we recently passed the milestone…
Computer science is also an experimental science. This is particularly the case for parallel computing, which is in a total state of flux, and where experiments are necessary to substantiate, complement, and challenge theoretical modeling…
Science students must deal with the errors inherent to all physical measurements and be conscious of the necessity to express their as a best estimate and a range of uncertainty. Errors are routinely classified as statistical or systematic.…
Rules in logic programming encode information about mutual interdependencies between literals that is not captured by any of the commonly used semantics. This information becomes essential as soon as a program needs to be modified or…
Over the past few years, deep learning methods have been applied for a wide range of Software Engineering (SE) tasks, including in particular for the important task of automatically predicting and localizing faults in software. With the…
[Context] Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assist qualitative research in Software Engineering (SE), yet the methodological implications of this usage remain underexplored. Their integration into interpretive processes…
Programming is ubiquitous in applied biostatistics; adopting software engineering skills will help biostatisticians do a better job. To explain this, we start by highlighting key challenges for software development and application in…
Similarity functions measure how comparable pairs of elements are, and play a key role in a wide variety of applications, e.g., notions of Individual Fairness abiding by the seminal paradigm of Dwork et al., as well as Clustering problems.…
This paper provides a survey of the emerging area of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Software Engineering (SE). It also sets out open research challenges for the application of LLMs to technical problems faced by software engineers. LLMs'…
Trust is a fundamental concept in human decision-making and collaboration that has long been studied in philosophy and psychology. However, software engineering (SE) articles often use the term trust informally; providing an explicit…