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In the past decade, research on test-suite-based automatic program repair has grown significantly. Each year, new approaches and implementations are featured in major software engineering venues. However, most of those approaches are…

Tile-based programming frameworks are increasingly adopted to write high-performance GPU kernels in domains such as deep learning and scientific computing. While these frameworks enhance productivity and hardware utilization, their…

Dynamic code, i.e., code that is created or modified at runtime, is ubiquitous in today's world. The behavior of dynamic code can depend on the logic of the dynamic code generator in subtle and non-obvious ways, with significant security…

Migration guides are a form of software documentation that helps developers address breaking changes introduced in library version updates. Prior studies have examined documents such as release notes, API reference manuals, and patch notes.…

Dependency management bots automatically open pull requests to update software dependencies on behalf of developers. Early research shows that developers are suspicious of updates performed by dependency management bots and feel tired of…

Once a failure is observed, the primary concern of the developer is to identify what caused it in order to repair the code that induced the incorrect behavior. Until a permanent repair is afforded, code repair patches are invaluable. The…

Mobile operating systems evolve quickly, frequently updating the APIs that app developers use to build their apps. Unfortunately, API updates do not always guarantee backward compatibility, causing apps to not longer work properly or even…

To enhance the compatibility in the version control of Java Third-party Libraries (TPLs), Maven adopts Semantic Versioning (SemVer) to standardize the underlying meaning of versions, but users could still confront abnormal execution and…

Software reuse may result in software bloat when significant portions of application dependencies are effectively unused. Several tools exist to remove unused (byte)code from an application or its dependencies, thus producing smaller…

Program errors are hard to find because of the cause-effect gap between the time when an error occurs and the time when the error becomes apparent to the programmer. Although debugging techniques such as conditional and data breakpoints…

Sequence generation applications require satisfying semantic constraints, such as ensuring that programs are correct, using certain keywords, or avoiding undesirable content. Language models, whether fine-tuned or prompted with few-shot…

Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's Codex, have demonstrated their potential to generate code from natural language descriptions across a wide range of programming tasks. Several benchmarks have recently emerged to evaluate the…

Smart contracts enable contract terms to be automatically executed and verified on the blockchain, and recent years have witnessed numerous applications of them in areas such as financial institutions and supply chains. The execution logic…

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…

The degree of dependencies among the modules of a software system is a key attribute to characterize its design structure and its ability to evolve over time. Several design problems are often correlated with undesired dependencies among…

Refactoring is a critical process in software development, aiming at improving the internal structure of code while preserving its external behavior. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments…

As a software system evolves, its architecture tends to degrade, and gradually impedes software maintenance and evolution activities and negatively impacts the quality attributes of the system. The main root cause behind architecture…

Explaining the prediction results of software defect prediction models is a challenging while practical task, which can provide useful information for developers to understand and fix the predicted bugs. To address this issue, recently,…

During the software evolution, existing features may be adversely affected by new changes, which is well known as regression errors. Maintaining a high-quality test suite is helpful to prevent regression errors, whereas it heavily depends…

Dependency solving is a hard (NP-complete) problem in all non-trivial component models due to either mutually incompatible versions of the same packages or explicitly declared package conflicts. As such, software upgrade planning needs to…