Related papers: Investigating the Impact of Code Comment Inconsist…
Code comments are important in software development because they directly influence software maintainability and overall quality. Bad practices of code comments lead to code comment smells, negatively impacting software maintenance. Recent…
Context: In the realm of software development, maintaining high software quality is a persistent challenge. However, this challenge is often impeded by the lack of comprehensive understanding of how specific code modifications influence…
Code comments play a crucial role in software development, as they provide programmers with practical information, allowing them to understand better the intent and semantics of the underpinning code. Nevertheless, developers tend to leave…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity among software engineers. A crucial aspect of developing effective code generation LLMs is to evaluate these models using a robust benchmark. Evaluation benchmarks with quality issues can…
The durability and quality of software contributions are critical factors in the long-term maintainability of a codebase. This paper introduces the Time to Modification (TTM) Theory, a novel approach for quantifying code quality by…
Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…
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…
What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with…
GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…
Code Review plays a crucial role in software quality, by allowing reviewers to discuss and critique any new patches before they can be successfully integrated into the project code. Yet, it is unsure the extent to which coding pattern…
Intrinsic bugs are bugs for which a bug introducing change can be identified in the version control system of a software. In contrast, extrinsic bugs are caused by external changes to a software, such as errors in external APIs; thereby…
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,…
As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…
Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…
A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly transformed software development, especially in code generation. However, their inconsistent performance, prone to hallucinations and quality issues, complicates program comprehension and hinders…
Professionals in academia, law, and finance audit their documents because inconsistencies can result in monetary, reputational, and scientific costs. Language models (LMs) have the potential to dramatically speed up this auditing process.…
Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the…
Comments within source code are essential for developers to comprehend the code's purpose and ensure its correct usage. However, as codebases evolve, maintaining an accurate alignment between the comments and the code becomes increasingly…
Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…