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While Reinforcement Learning ( RL) has made great strides towards solving increasingly complicated problems, many algorithms are still brittle to even slight environmental changes. Contextual Reinforcement Learning (cRL) provides a…

With the exponential growth of AI tools that generate source code, understanding software has become crucial. When developers comprehend a program, they may refer to additional contexts to look for information, e.g. program documentation or…

Modern Code Review (MCR) plays a key role in software quality practices. In MCR process, a new patch (i.e., a set of code changes) is encouraged to be examined by reviewers in order to identify weaknesses in source code prior to an…

Context: In collaborative software development, the peer code review process proves beneficial only when the reviewers provide useful comments. Objective: This paper investigates the usefulness of Code Review Comments (CR comments) through…

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has changed software development, with tools like Copilot, JetBrains AI Assistant, and others boosting developers' productivity. However, developers now spend more time reviewing code than…

Code merging is a significant challenge, particularly in large-scale projects. Existing solutions, including program analysis and machine learning, show promise but face critical limitations. Program analysis lacks the ability to infer…

The immense amounts of source code provide ample challenges and opportunities during software development. To handle the size of code bases, developers commonly search for code, e.g., when trying to find where a particular feature is…

Code analysis is fundamental in Software Engineering, supporting debugging, optimization, and security assessment. Human developers approach it through syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. Traditional tools are…

Context: Writing Clean Code understandable by other collaborators has become crucial to enhancing collaboration and productivity. However, very little is known regarding whether developers agree with Clean Code Principles and how they apply…

Public Code Review (PCR) is developed in the Software Question Answering (SQA) community, assisting developers in exploring high-quality and efficient review services. Current methods on PCR mainly focus on the reviewer's perspective,…

The automatic generation of source code is one of the long-lasting dreams in software engineering research. Several techniques have been proposed to speed up the writing of new code. For example, code completion techniques can recommend to…

Context: Learning-based automatic program repair techniques are showing promise to provide quality fix suggestions for detected bugs in the source code of the software. These tools mostly exploit historical data of buggy and fixed code…

Code review is a crucial process before deploying code to production, as it validates the code, provides suggestions for improvements, and identifies errors such as missed edge cases. In projects with regular production releases, the effort…

Software visualization approaches for code reviews are often implemented as standalone applications, which use static code analysis. The goal is to visualize the structural changes introduced by a pull / merge request to facilitate the…

We investigate a growing body of work that seeks to improve recommender systems through the use of review text. Generally, these papers argue that since reviews 'explain' users' opinions, they ought to be useful to infer the underlying…

A growing number of empirical software engineering researchers suggest that a complementary focus on theory is required if the discipline is to mature. A first step in theory-building involves the establishment of suitable theoretical…

Code review is a crucial but often complex, subjective, and time-consuming activity in software development. Over the past decades, significant efforts have been made to automate this process. Early approaches focused on knowledge-based…

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly integrated into software engineering and maintenance tasks due to their high performance with software engineering tasks and robust understanding of modern programming languages. However,…

Meeting the rise of industry demand to incorporate machine learning (ML) components into software systems requires interdisciplinary teams contributing to a shared code base. To maintain consistency, reduce defects and ensure…

Code search engines usually use readability feature to rank code snippets. There are several metrics to calculate this feature, but developers may have different perceptions about readability. Correlation between readability and…