Related papers: Linking Code and Documentation Churn: Preliminary …
Context: Contemporary code review tools are a popular choice for software quality assurance. Using these tools, reviewers are able to post a linkage between two patches during a review discussion. Large development teams that use a…
Forking is a common practice for developers when building upon on already existing projects. These forks create variants, which have a common code base but then evolve the code in different directions, which is specific to that forked…
The complexity and size increase of software has extended the delay for developers as they wait for code analysis and code merge. With the larger and more complex software, more developers nowadays are developing software with large source…
Increasing code velocity (or the speed with which code changes are reviewed and merged) is integral to speeding up development and contributes to the work satisfaction of engineers. While factors affecting code change acceptance have been…
Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created - and maintained - synchronously. In this paper we investigate whether production code and the accompanying tests co-evolve by…
Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…
Modern software development teams are distributed across onsite and off-shore locations. Each team has developers with varying experience levels and English communication skills. In such a diverse development environment it is important to…
Deep Learning (DL) frameworks play a critical role in advancing artificial intelligence, and their rapid growth underscores the need for a comprehensive understanding of software quality and maintainability. DL frameworks, like other…
Consistency is one of the keys to maintainable source code and hence a successful software project. We propose a novel method of extracting the intent of programmers from source code of a large project (~300kLOC) and checking the semantic…
Maintaining consistency between code and documentation is a crucial yet frequently overlooked aspect of software development. Even minor mismatches can confuse API users, introduce new bugs, and increase overall maintenance effort. This…
As developers increasingly rely on LLM-generated code summaries for documentation, testing, and review, it is important to study whether these summaries accurately reflect what the program actually does. LLMs often produce confident…
Code review is widely known as one of the best practices for software quality assurance in software development. In a typical code review process, reviewers check the code committed by developers to ensure the quality of the code, during…
README files play an important role in providing installation-related instructions to software users and are widely used in open source software systems on platforms such as GitHub. However, these files often suffer from various…
Code documentation can, if written precisely, help developers better understand the code they accompany. However, unlike code, code documentation cannot be automatically verified via execution, potentially leading to inconsistencies between…
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…
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…
One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…
An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…
Software documentation is an essential but labor intensive task that often requires a dedicated team of developers to ensure coverage and accuracy. Good documentation will help shorten the development cycle and improve the overall team…
Context: Code coverage is widely used as a software quality assurance measure. However, its effect, and specifically the advisable dose, are disputed in both the research and engineering communities. Prior work reports only correlational…