Related papers: Demystifying and Assessing Code Understandability …

Recent work on interpretability has focused on concept-based explanations, where deep learning models are explained in terms of high-level units of information, referred to as concepts. Concept learning models, however, have been shown to…

The C and C++ programming languages are widely used for the implementation of software in critical systems. They are complex languages with subtle features and peculiarities that might baffle even the more expert programmers. Hence, the…

Over the past few years, deep learning methods have been applied for a wide range of Software Engineering (SE) tasks, including in particular for the important task of automatically predicting and localizing faults in software. With the…

Despite being an old language feature, Java exception handling code is one of the least understood parts of many systems. Several studies have analyzed the characteristics of exception handling code, trying to identify common practices or…

Background. Test resources are usually limited and therefore it is often not possible to completely test an application before a release. To cope with the problem of scarce resources, development teams can apply defect prediction to…

Build verifiability refers to the property that the build of a software system can be verified by independent third parties and it is crucial for the trustworthiness of a software system. Various efforts towards build verifiability have…

Code obfuscation is the conversion of original source code into a functionally equivalent but less readable form, aiming to prevent reverse engineering and intellectual property theft. This is a challenging task since it is crucial to…

Coding is an integral aspect of programming. A programmer can automatically complete a code fragment after writing a few tokens, and the process of automatic completion is known as code completion. Several research studies on code…

It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code written in a…

When writing programs, people have the ability to tackle a new complex task by decomposing it into smaller and more familiar subtasks. While it is difficult to measure whether neural program synthesis methods have similar capabilities, what…

Software architectural changes involve more than one module or component and are complex to analyze compared to local code changes. Development teams aiming to review architectural aspects (design) of a change commit consider many essential…

Context: Writing Clean Code understandable by other collaborators has become crucial to enhancing collaboration and productivity. However, very little is known regarding whether developers agree with Clean Code Principles and how they apply…

Unlike code generation, which involves creating code from scratch, code completion focuses on integrating new lines or blocks of code into an existing codebase. This process requires a deep understanding of the surrounding context, such as…

The ability to identify authors of computer programs based on their coding style is a direct threat to the privacy and anonymity of programmers. While recent work found that source code can be attributed to authors with high accuracy,…

This research paper aims to find, analyze and understand code patterns in any software system and measure its quality by defining standards and proposing a formula for the same. Every code that is written can be divided into different code…

Knowledge-based systems are suitable for realizing advanced functions that require domain-specific expert knowledge, while knowledge representation languages and their supporting environments are essential for realizing such systems.…

With little to no parallel data available for programming languages, unsupervised methods are well-suited to source code translation. However, the majority of unsupervised machine translation approaches rely on back-translation, a method…

In managed languages, serialization of objects is typically done in bespoke binary formats such as Protobuf, or markup languages such as XML or JSON. The major limitation of these formats is readability. Human developers cannot read binary…

Despite recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation, the quality of LLM-generated code still faces significant challenges. One significant issue is code repetition, which refers to the model's tendency to generate…

Formal verification is increasingly recognized as a critical foundation for building reliable software systems. However, the need for specialized expertise to write precise specifications, navigate complex proof obligations, and learn…