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AI coding assistants have become prolific in recent years. Through a longitudinal mixed-methods investigation, we examined how professional software engineers perceive the effects of AI coding assistants in regard to task focus, developer…
Large language model (LLM)-based coding assistants have made substantial progress, yet most systems remain reactive, requiring developers to explicitly formulate their needs. Proactive coding assistants aim to infer latent developer intent…
An inherently abstract nature of source code makes programs difficult to understand. In our research, we designed three techniques utilizing concrete values of variables and other expressions during program execution. RuntimeSearch is a…
Context: Technical debt management is challenging for software engineers due to poor tool support and a lack of knowledge on how to prioritize technical debt repayment and prevention activities. Furthermore, when there is a large backlog of…
This study explores the intricate relationship between sentiment analysis (SA) and code quality within machine learning (ML) projects, illustrating how the emotional dynamics of developers affect the technical and functional attributes of…
Software is infamous for its poor quality and frequent occurrence of bugs. While there is no doubt that thorough testing is an appropriate answer to ensure sufficient quality, the poor state of software generally suggests that developers…
Debugging is a relevant task for finding bugs during software development, maintenance, and evolution. During debugging, developers use modern IDE debuggers to analyze variables, step execution, and set breakpoints. Observing IDE debuggers,…
The functional interaction structure of a team captures the preferences with which members of different roles interact. This paper presents a data-driven approach to detect the functional interaction structure for software development teams…
Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…
The study of affects (i.e., emotions, moods) in the workplace has received a lot of attention in the last 15 years. Despite the fact that software development has been shown to be intellectual, creative, and driven by cognitive activities,…
Novice programmers face numerous barriers while attempting to learn how to code that may deter them from pursuing a computer science degree or career in software development. In this work, we propose a tool concept to address the…
Context. Source code refactoring is a well-established approach to improving source code quality without compromising its external behavior. Motivation. The literature described the benefits of refactoring, yet its application in practice…
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led to dramatic improvements across a wide range of natural language tasks. Their performance on certain tasks can be further enhanced by incorporating test-time reasoning techniques. These…
Despite coding agents' advances in handling increasingly complex tasks, their continued tendency to introduce unintended edits, subtle bugs, and scope drift that slip past code review means developers must still decide how much autonomy to…
With the increasing reliance on software and automation nowadays, tight deadlines, limited resources, and prioritization of functionality over security can lead to insecure coding practices. When not handled properly, these constraints…
Affects---emotions and moods---have an impact on cognitive processing activities and the working performance of individuals. It has been established that software development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing activities.…
There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is…
Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…
A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…
Context: In seeking to better understand the impact of various human factors in software development, and how teams' attitudes relate to their performance, increasing attention is being given to the study of team-related artefacts. In…