Related papers: Understanding Code Understandability Improvements …
Recently, automatic code comment generation is proposed to facilitate program comprehension. Existing code comment generation techniques focus on describing the functionality of the source code. However, there are other aspects such as…
Code review is an essential part to software development lifecycle since it aims at guaranteeing the quality of codes. Modern code review activities necessitate developers viewing, understanding and even running the programs to assess…
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: Research software is software developed by and/or used by researchers, across a wide variety of domains, to perform their research. Because of the complexity of research software, developers cannot conduct exhaustive testing. As…
Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up…
The readability of source code is key for understanding and maintaining software systems and tests. Several studies investigate the readability of source code, but there is limited research on the readability of test code and related…
Software development is a collaborative process that involves various interactions among individuals and teams. TODO comments in source code play a critical role in managing and coordinating diverse tasks during this process. However, this…
Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…
Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…
Increasing code velocity is a common goal for a variety of software projects. The efficiency of the code review process significantly impacts how fast the code gets merged into the final product and reaches the customers. We conducted a…
Unreadable code could be a breeding ground for errors. Thus, previous work defined approaches based on machine learning to automatically assess code readability that can warn developers when some code artifacts (e.g., classes) become…
This paper illustrates an empirical study of the working efficiency of machine learning techniques in classifying code review text by semantic meaning. The code review comments from the source control repository in GitHub were extracted for…
In software development and maintenance, code comments can help developers understand source code, and improve communication among developers. However, developers sometimes neglect to update the corresponding comment when changing the code,…
The automation of code review has been tackled by several researchers with the goal of reducing its cost. The adoption of deep learning in software engineering pushed the automation to new boundaries, with techniques imitating developers in…
Code review is a critical practice in modern software engineering, helping developers detect defects early, improve code quality, and facilitate knowledge sharing. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), a growing body…
Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without…
Developers use tools such as GitHub pull requests to review code, discuss proposed changes, and request modifications. While changed files are commonly presented in alphabetical order, this does not necessarily coincide with the reviewer's…
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…
Code review is a well-established and valued practice in the software engineering community contributing to both code quality and interpersonal benefits. However, there are challenges in both tools and processes that give rise to…
As a software system evolves, its architecture tends to degrade, and gradually impedes software maintenance and evolution activities and negatively impacts the quality attributes of the system. The main root cause behind architecture…