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Large language models are increasingly trained on corpora containing both natural language and non-linguistic data like source code. Aside from aiding programming-related tasks, anecdotal evidence suggests that including code in pretraining…

Programming is essential to modern scientific research, yet most scientists report inadequate training for the software development their work demands. Generative AI tools capable of code generation may support scientific programmers, but…

The field of big code relies on mining large corpora of code to perform some learning task. A significant threat to this approach has been recently identified by Lopes et al. (2017) who found a large amount of near-duplicate code on GitHub.…

Live programming features can be found in a range of programming environments, from individual prototypes to widely used environments. While liveness is generally considered a useful property, there is little empirical evidence on when and…

Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It aims at automatically predicting the next tokens or lines that the programmers tend to use. A good code completion tool can…

Despite widespread adoption, the impact of AI tools on software development in the wild remains understudied. We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the February-June 2025 frontier affect the…

Mob Programming, or "mobbing", is a relatively new collaborative programming practice being experimented with in different organizational contexts. There are a number of claimed benefits to this way of working, but it is not clear if these…

Just because software developers say they believe in "X", that does not necessarily mean that "X" is true. As shown here, there exist numerous beliefs listed in the recent Software Engineering literature which are only supported by small…

This paper studies the problem of predicting the coding effort for a subsequent year of development by analysing metrics extracted from project repositories, with an emphasis on projects containing XML code. The study considers thirteen…

Context: Several studies investigated the impact of anti-patterns (i.e., "poor" solutions to recurring design problems) during maintenance activities and reported that anti-patterns significantly affect the developers' effort required to…

The introduction of new tools in people's workflow has always been promotive of new creative paths. This paper discusses the impact of using computational tools in the performance of creative tasks, especially focusing on graphic design.…

Software engineering is a highly dynamic discipline. Hence, as times change, so too might our beliefs about core processes in this field. This paper checks some five beliefs that originated in the past decades that comment on the…

Instructors have limited time and resources to help struggling students, and these resources should be directed to the students who most need them. To address this, researchers have constructed models that can predict students' final course…

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

Code-generating Artificial Intelligence has gained popularity within both professional and educational programming settings over the past several years. While research and pedagogy are beginning to cope with this change, computing students…

Automated batch refactoring has become a de-facto mechanism to restructure software that may have significant design flaws negatively impacting the code quality and maintainability. Although automated batch refactoring techniques are known…

Measuring developer productivity is a topic that has attracted attention from both academic research and industrial practice. In the age of AI coding assistants, it has become even more important for both academia and industry to understand…

Background: The increasing adoption of AI assistants in programming has led to numerous studies exploring their benefits. While developers consistently report significant productivity gains from these tools, empirical measurements often…

Academic software development practices often differ from those of commercial development settings, yet only limited research has been conducted on assessing software development practises in academia. Here we present a case study of…

Neural code synthesis has reached a point where snippet generation is accurate enough to be considered for integration into human software development workflows. Commercial products aim to increase programmers' productivity, without being…