Related papers: Understanding Code Understandability Improvements …
Code comments are important artifacts in software systems and play a paramount role in many software engineering (SE) tasks related to maintenance and program comprehension. However, while it is widely accepted that high quality matters in…
Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…
Software developers and maintainers need to read and understand source programs and other software artifacts. The increase in size and complexity of software drastically affects several quality attributes, especially understandability and…
Background: Despite the widespread use of automated security defect detection tools, software projects still contain many security defects that could result in serious damage. Such tools are largely context-insensitive and may not cover all…
Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…
Code review is a widely-used practice in software development companies to identify defects. Hence, code review has been included in many software engineering curricula at universities worldwide. However, teaching code review is still a…
The code review comment (CRC) is pivotal in the process of modern code review. It provides reviewers with the opportunity to identify potential bugs, offer constructive feedback, and suggest improvements. Clear and concise code review…
Decompilation, the process of converting machine-level code into readable source code, plays a critical role in reverse engineering. Given that the main purpose of decompilation is to facilitate code comprehension in scenarios where the…
Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a new era in automated code translation across programming languages. Since most code-specific LLMs are pretrained on well-commented code from large repositories like GitHub, it is…
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…
To ensure that Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively support user productivity, they need to be adjusted. Existing Code Readability (CR) models can guide this alignment. However, there are concerns about their relevance in modern…
Software testing plays a crucial role in the contribution process of open-source projects. For example, contributions introducing new features are expected to include tests, and contributions with tests are more likely to be accepted.…
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…
Code reuse is a widespread practice across software development projects, suggesting an inherent trust in the reused code. Yet, there is a lack of a fundamental understanding of developers' trust and how various factors mold their…
Although peer code review is widely adopted in both commercial and open source development, existing studies suggest that such code reviews often contain a significant amount of non-useful review comments. Unfortunately, to date, no tools…
Code reviews are a critical aspect of open-source software (OSS) development, ensuring quality and fostering collaboration. This study examines perceptions, challenges, and biases in OSS code review processes, focusing on the perspectives…
Recent research provides evidence that effective communication in collaborative software development has significant impact on the software development lifecycle. Although related qualitative and quantitative studies point out textual…
Context: Modern code review is a widely employed technique in both industrial and open-source projects, serving to enhance software quality, share knowledge, and ensure compliance with coding standards and guidelines. While code review is…
Context: Developers spend most of their time comprehending source code during software development. Automatically assessing how readable and understandable source code is can provide various benefits in different tasks, such as task…