Related papers: Code Ownership: The Principles, Differences, and T…

Context: Software Architecture (SA) and Source Code (SC) are two intertwined artefacts that represent the interdependent design decisions made at different levels of abstractions - High-Level (HL) and Low-Level (LL). An understanding of the…

Most modern software products incorporate open-source components, requiring development teams to maintain compliance with each component's licenses. Noncompliance can have significant financial, legal, and reputational repercussions.…

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…

Objective: To present an overview on the current state of the art concerning metrics-based quality evaluation of software components and component assemblies. Method: Comparison of several approaches available in the literature, using a…

Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…

Source code authorship attribution is important in software forensics, plagiarism detection, and protecting software patch integrity. Existing techniques often rely on supervised machine learning, which struggles with generalization across…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

When software evolves, opportunities for introducing faults appear. Therefore, it is important to test the evolved program behaviors during each evolution cycle. We conduct an exploratory study to investigate the properties of…

With an ever-increasing amount of open source software, the popularity of services like GitHub that facilitate code reuse, and common misconceptions about the licensing of open source software, the problem of license violations in the code…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Well structured and readable source code is a pre-requisite for maintainable software and successful collaboration among developers. Static analysis enables the automated extraction of code complexity and readability metrics which can be…

Ownership is the concept of tracking aliases and mutations to data, useful for both memory safety and system design. The Rust programming language implements ownership via the borrow checker, a static analyzer that extends the core type…

Past research on software product lines has focused on the initial development of reusable assets and related challenges, such as cost estimation and implementation issues. Naturally, as software product lines are increasingly adopted…

Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…

In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…

In recent years, the complexity of the software is increasing due to automation of every segment of application. Software is nowhere remained as one-time development product since its architectural dimension is increasing with addition of…

Automated code summarization is a long-standing goal for code comprehension. This task automatically generates documentation using a given method. Deep Learning (DL)-based approaches have been proven beneficial for various software…

Managing requirements on quality aspects is an important issue in the development of software systems. Difficulties arise from expressing them appropriately what in turn results from the difficulty of the concept of quality itself. Building…

There is a multitude of licenses out there for a software developer to choose from, but a lot of programmers would prefer to not have to have a legal degree in order to understand them and would rather just have their code out in the public…