Related papers: Code Documentation and Analysis to Secure Software…

Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…

Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…

Recent releases such as o3 highlight human-like "thinking with images" reasoning that combines tool use with stepwise verification, yet most open-source approaches still rely on text-only chains, rigid visual schemas, or single-step…

Code review is a common process that is used by developers, in which a reviewer provides useful comments or points out defects in the submitted source code changes via pull request. Code review has been widely used for both industry and…

Comments, or natural language descriptions of source code, are standard practice among software developers. By communicating important aspects of the code such as functionality and usage, comments help with software project maintenance.…

Due to the proliferation of short-form content and the rapid adoption of AI, opportunities for deep, reflective thinking have significantly diminished, undermining users' critical thinking and reducing engagement with the reasoning behind…

When comprehending code, a helping hand may come from the natural language comments documenting it that, unfortunately, are not always there. To support developers in such a scenario, several techniques have been presented to automatically…

We introduce Seshat, a new, simple and open-source software to efficiently manage annotations of speech corpora. The Seshat software allows users to easily customise and manage annotations of large audio corpora while ensuring compliance…

Code documentation is a critical aspect of software development, serving as a bridge between human understanding and machine-readable code. Beyond assisting developers in understanding and maintaining code, documentation also plays a…

Annotated data is an essential ingredient in natural language processing for training and evaluating machine learning models. It is therefore very desirable for the annotations to be of high quality. Recent work, however, has shown that…

In text generation evaluation, many practical issues, such as inconsistent experimental settings and metric implementations, are often ignored but lead to unfair evaluation and untenable conclusions. We present CoTK, an open-source toolkit…

Software comments are critical for human understanding of software, and as such many comment generation techniques have been proposed. However, we find that a systematic evaluation of the factual accuracy of generated comments is rare; only…

Recent In-IDE AI coding assistant tools (ACATs) like GitHub Copilot have significantly impacted developers' coding habits. While some studies have examined their effectiveness, there lacks in-depth investigation into the actual assistance…

Large Language Models for Code (or code LLMs) are increasingly gaining popularity and capabilities, offering a wide array of functionalities such as code completion, code generation, code summarization, test generation, code translation,…

Code review is a key development practice that contributes to improve software quality and to foster knowledge sharing among developers. However, code review usually takes time and demands detailed and time-consuming analysis of textual…

Static Analysis Tools (SATs) are central to security engineering activities, as they enable early identification of code weaknesses without requiring execution. However, their effectiveness is often limited by high false-positive rates and…

This paper describes an interactive tool that facilitates following define-use chains in large codes. The motivation for the work is to support relative debugging, where it is necessary to iteratively refine a set of asser-tions between…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a groundbreaking tool in NLP, notably for its efficacy in complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical proofs. However, its application in code generation faces a distinct challenge, i.e., although the…

In our research, we investigate the challenges that software engineers face during program comprehension, particularly when debugging unfamiliar codebases. We propose a novel tool, CodeCompass, to address these issues. Our study highlights…

We formulate the novel task of automatically updating an existing natural language comment based on changes in the body of code it accompanies. We propose an approach that learns to correlate changes across two distinct language…