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Debugging is a central yet complex activity in software engineering. Prior studies have documented debugging strategies and tool usage, but little theory explains how experienced developers reason about bugs in large, real-world codebases.…

Automated program repair is an emerging technology that seeks to automatically rectify bugs and vulnerabilities using learning, search, and semantic analysis. Trust in automatically generated patches is necessary for achieving greater…

Reusing code snippets shared by other programmers on Q&A forums (e.g., StackOverflow) is a common practice followed by software developers. However, lack of sufficient information about the fully qualified name (FQN) of identifiers in…

Bug-fix benchmarks are essential for evaluating methodologies in automatic program repair (APR) and fault localization (FL). However, existing benchmarks, exemplified by Defects4J, need to evolve to incorporate recent bug-fixes aligned with…

Third-party library reuse has become common practice in contemporary software development, as it includes several benefits for developers. Library dependencies are constantly evolving, with newly added features and patches that fix bugs in…

Program transformation has gained a wide interest since it is used for several purposes: altering semantics of a program, adding features to a program or performing optimizations. In this paper we focus on program transformations at the…

Rotten green tests are passing tests which have, at least, one assertion not executed. They give developers a false confidence. In this paper, we present, RTj, a framework that analyzes test cases from Java projects with the goal of…

For software testing research, Defects4J stands out as the primary benchmark dataset, offering a controlled environment to study real bugs from prominent open-source systems. However, prior research indicates that Defects4J might include…

Static program slicing is a fundamental technique in software engineering. Traditional static slicing tools rely on parsing complete source code, which limits their applicability to real-world scenarios where code snippets are incomplete or…

Program slicing is a critical technique in software engineering, enabling developers to isolate relevant portions of code for tasks such as bug detection, code comprehension, and debugging. In this study, we investigate the application of…

The increasing complexity of modern software systems has made understanding their behavior increasingly challenging, driving the need for explainability to improve transparency and user trust. Traditional documentation is often outdated or…

JavaScript packages are notoriously prone to bloat, a factor that significantly impacts the performance and maintainability of web applications. While web bundlers and tree-shaking can mitigate this issue in client-side applications,…

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…

Mobile developers face unique challenges when detecting and reporting crashes in apps due to their prevailing GUI event-driven nature and additional sources of inputs (e.g., sensor readings). To support developers in these tasks, we…

Context: Static analyses are well-established to aid in understanding bugs or vulnerabilities during the development process or in large-scale studies. A low false-positive rate is essential for the adaption in practice and for precise…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

Program debloating aims to remove unused code to reduce performance overhead, attack surfaces, and maintenance costs. Over time, debloating has evolved across multiple layers (container, library, and application), each building on the…

Defects are common in software systems and can potentially cause various problems to software users. Different methods have been developed to quickly predict the most likely locations of defects in large code bases. Most of them focus on…

Dependabot, a popular dependency management tool, includes a compatibility score feature that helps client packages assess the risk of accepting a dependency update by leveraging knowledge from "the crowd". For each dependency update,…

Software security remains a critical concern, particularly as junior developers, often lacking comprehensive knowledge of security practices, contribute to codebases. While there are tools to help developers proactively write secure code,…