Related papers: Are your comments outdated? Towards automatically …
Documenting the functionality of software units with code comments, e.g., Javadoc comments, is a common programmer best-practice in software engineering. This paper introduces a novel test generation technique that exploits the code-comment…
Comments within code serve as a crucial foundation for software documentation, facilitating developers to communicate and understand the code effectively. However, code-comment inconsistency (CCI) can negatively affect software development,…
Researches have shown that most effort of today's software development is maintenance and evolution. Developers often use integrated development environments, debuggers, and tools for code search, testing, and program understanding to…
Code review is an important practice in software development, yet it is time-consuming and requires substantial effort. While open-source datasets have been used to train neural models for automating code review tasks, including review…
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…
Software maintenance constitutes a substantial portion of the total lifetime costs of software, with a significant portion attributed to code comprehension. Software comprehension is eased by documentation such as comments that summarize…
Code comments are important in software development because they directly influence software maintainability and overall quality. Bad practices of code comments lead to code comment smells, negatively impacting software maintenance. Recent…
While comments are essential for enhancing code readability and maintainability in modern software projects, developers are often motivated to update code but not comments, leading to outdated or inconsistent documentation that hinders…
Encountering outdated documentation is not a rare occurrence for developers and users in the software engineering community. To ensure that software documentation is up-to-date, developers often have to manually check whether the…
During code reviews, an essential step in software quality assurance, reviewers have the difficult task of understanding and evaluating code changes to validate their quality and prevent introducing faults to the codebase. This is a tedious…
A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…
Links are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, and source code repositories are no exception. However, despite their many undisputed benefits, links can suffer from decay, insufficient versioning, and lack of bidirectional…
Reusing code can produce duplicate or near-duplicate code clones in code repositories. Current code clone detection techniques, like Program Dependence Graphs, rely on code structure and their dependencies to detect clones. These techniques…
Method-level comments are critical for improving code comprehension and supporting software maintenance. With advancements in large language models (LLMs), automated comment generation has become a major research focus. However, existing…
Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…
Code maintenance data sets typically consist of a before and after version of the code that contains the improvement or fix. Such data sets are important for software engineering support tools related to code maintenance, such as program…
Code Review plays a crucial role in software quality, by allowing reviewers to discuss and critique any new patches before they can be successfully integrated into the project code. Yet, it is unsure the extent to which coding pattern…
An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…
Code comments are significantly helpful in comprehending software programs and also aid developers to save a great deal of time in software maintenance. Code comment generation aims to automatically predict comments in natural language…
Code comments can help in program comprehension and are considered as important artifacts to help developers in software maintenance. However, the comments are mostly missing or are outdated, specially in complex software projects. As a…