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Predicting the runtime complexity of a programming code is an arduous task. In fact, even for humans, it requires a subtle analysis and comprehensive knowledge of algorithms to predict time complexity with high fidelity, given any code. As…

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

Code review is a widely-used practice in software development companies to identify defects. Hence, code review has been included in many software engineering curricula at universities worldwide. However, teaching code review is still a…

Test Impact Analysis is an approach to obtain a subset of tests impacted by code changes. This approach is mainly applied to unit testing where the link between the code and its associated tests is easy to obtain. On the integration level,…

Large language model (LLM) based coding agents increasingly act as autonomous contributors that generate and merge pull requests, yet their real-world effects on software projects are unclear-especially compared with widely adopted…

Lack of experience, inadequate documentation, and sub-optimal API design frequently cause developers to make mistakes when re-using third-party implementations. Such API misuses can result in unintended behavior, performance losses, or…

In this paper we investigate the effect of long-term GUI changes occurring during application development on the reusability of existing GUI test cases. We conduct an empirical evaluation on two complex, open-source GUI-driven applications…

Transformer-based language models for automatic code completion have shown great promise so far, yet the evaluation of these models rarely uses real data. This study provides both quantitative and qualitative assessments of three public…

One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…

Code naturalness, which captures repetitiveness and predictability in programming languages, has proven valuable for various code-related tasks in software engineering. However, precisely measuring code naturalness remains a fundamental…

This paper presents the source code analysis of a file reader server socket program (connection-oriented sockets) developed in Java, to illustrate the identification, impact analysis and solutions to remove five important software security…

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…

Usability issues that exist in security APIs cause programmers to embed those security APIs incorrectly to the applications they develop. This results in introduction of security vulnerabilities to those applications. One of the main…

Understanding binary code is an essential but complex software engineering task for reverse engineering, malware analysis, and compiler optimization. Unlike source code, binary code has limited semantic information, which makes it…

The increasing trend of using Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation raises the question of their capability to generate trustworthy code. While many researchers are exploring the utility of code generation for uncovering software…

Code ownership -- an approximation of the degree of ownership of a software component -- is one of the important software measures used in quality improvement plans. However, prior studies proposed different variants of code ownership…

Source code is changed for a reason, e.g., to adapt, correct, or adapt it. This reason can provide valuable insight into the development process but is rarely explicitly documented when the change is committed to a source code repository.…

Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology…

Code review is a critical software engineering practice where developers review code changes before integration to ensure code quality, detect defects, and improve maintainability. In recent years, AI agents that can understand code…

The automatic generation of source code is one of the long-lasting dreams in software engineering research. Several techniques have been proposed to speed up the writing of new code. For example, code completion techniques can recommend to…