Related papers: Are your comments outdated? Towards automatically …

Zero-day vulnerabilities can be accidentally or maliciously placed in code and can remain in place for years. In this study, we address an aspect of their longevity by considering the likelihood that they will be discovered in the code…

Code generation systems have been extensively developed in recent years to generate source code based on natural language instructions. However, despite their advancements, these systems still face robustness issues where even slightly…

Background: As improving code review (CR) effectiveness is a priority for many software development organizations, projects have deployed CR analytics platforms to identify potential improvement areas. The number of issues identified, which…

Pre-trained code models rely heavily on high-quality pre-training data, particularly human-written reference comments that bridge code and natural language. However, these comments often become outdated as software evolves, degrading model…

Comments are an important part of the source code and are a primary source of documentation. This has driven interest in using large bodies of comments to train or evaluate tools that consume or produce them -- such as generating oracles or…

Code review is an effective software quality assurance activity; however, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Thus, a number of generation-based automatic code review (ACR) approaches have been proposed recently, which leverage deep…

Recently, there have been original attempts to use the concept of "code similarity" in program repair, suggesting that similarity analysis has an important role in the repair process. However, there is no dedicated work to characterize and…

Code readability is one of the main aspects of code quality, influenced by various properties like identifier names, comments, code structure, and adherence to standards. However, measuring this attribute poses challenges in both industry…

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…

Code Clone Detection, which aims to retrieve functionally similar programs from large code bases, has been attracting increasing attention. Modern software often involves a diverse range of programming languages. However, current code clone…

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…

Software systems are getting more complex as the system grows where maintaining such system is a primary concern for the industry. Code clone is one of the factors making software maintenance more difficult. It is a process of replicating…

Automatic code generation is to generate the program code according to the given natural language description. The current mainstream approach uses neural networks to encode natural language descriptions, and output abstract syntax trees…

Code samples play a pivotal role in open-source ecosystems (OSSECO), serving as lightweight artifacts that support knowledge transfer, onboarding, and framework adoption. Despite their instructional relevance, these samples are often…

The programming skill is one crucial ability for Large Language Models (LLMs), necessitating a deep understanding of programming languages (PLs) and their correlation with natural languages (NLs). We examine the impact of pre-training data…

Code review consists of manual inspection, discussion, and judgment of source code by developers other than the code's author. Due to discussions around competing ideas and group decision-making processes, interpersonal conflicts during…

Version control systems for source code, such as Git, are key tools in modern software development environments. Many developers use online services, such as GitHub or GitLab, for collaborative software development. While software projects…

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…

Code comments provide important information for understanding the source code. They can help developers understand the overall purpose of a function or class, as well as identify bugs and technical debt. However, an overabundance of…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…