Related papers: Exploring the Impact of Source Code Linearity on t…

Transformer-based pre-trained models have recently achieved great results in solving many software engineering tasks including automatic code completion which is a staple in a developer's toolkit. While many have striven to improve the…

In this paper two intensive problems faced during software application's analysis and development process arose by the software industry are briefly conversed i.e. identification of fault proneness and increase in rate of variability in the…

Object-oriented Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) support software reuse by providing pre-implemented functionalities. Due to the huge number of included classes, reusing and understanding large APIs is a complex task. Otherwise,…

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…

Programming courses can be challenging for first year university students, especially for those without prior coding experience. Students initially struggle with code syntax, but as more advanced topics are introduced across a semester, the…

Real-world programs are neither monolithic nor static -- they are constructed using platform and third party libraries, and both programs and libraries continuously evolve in response to change pressure. In case of the Java language, rules…

Objectives: This study aims to investigate the readability and understandability of bitwise operators in programming, with the main hypothesis that there will be a difference in the performance metrics (response time and error rate) between…

Code snippet adaptation is a fundamental activity in the software development process. Unlike code generation, code snippet adaptation is not a "free creation", which requires developers to tailor a given code snippet in order to fit…

Developers rely on third-party library Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when developing software. However, libraries typically come with assumptions and API usage constraints, whose violation results in API misuse. API misuses may…

As researchers and practitioners apply Machine Learning to increasingly more software engineering problems, the approaches they use become more sophisticated. A lot of modern approaches utilize internal code structure in the form of an…

This paper proposes an open source visual analytics tool consisting of several views and perspectives on eye movement data collected during code reading tasks when writing computer programs. Hence the focus of this work is on code and…

Software designers and developers are increasingly relying on application frameworks as first-class design concepts. They instantiate the services that frameworks provide to implement various architectural tactics and patterns. One of the…

Following code style conventions in software projects is essential for maintaining overall code quality. Adhering to these conventions improves maintainability, understandability, and extensibility. Additionally, following best practices…

Software developers use metrics to evaluate code quality and productivity, but these practices are still rare in programming education. This project bridges the gap by collecting real-time learning analytics from individual student and…

This paper systematically investigates the generation of code explanations by Large Language Models (LLMs) for code examples commonly encountered in introductory programming courses. Our findings reveal significant variations in the nature…

In software development, it is common for programmers to copy-paste or port code snippets and then adapt them to their use case. This scenario motivates the code adaptation task -- a variant of program repair which aims to adapt variable…

Even relatively simple code analysis can be a daunting task for many first year students. Perceived complexity, coupled with foreign and harsh syntax, often outstrips the ability for students to take in what they are seeing in terms of…

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,…

Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…

Developers often extract methods to improve readability, understanding, and reuse, while inlining keeps logic in one block. Prior work based on static metrics has not shown clear differences between these practices, and the human side of…