Related papers: Quantifying the benefits of code hints for refacto…

Motivation: Students learning to program often reach states where they are stuck and can make no forward progress. An automatically generated next-step hint can help them make forward progress and support their learning. It is important to…

In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a…

Being able to automatically repair programs is an extremely challenging task. In this paper, we present MintHint, a novel technique for program repair that is a departure from most of today's approaches. Instead of trying to fully automate…

Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…

Translating a program written in one programming language to another can be useful for software development tasks that need functionality implementations in different languages. Although past studies have considered this problem, they may…

Automatic source code analysis in key areas of software engineering, such as code security, can benefit from Machine Learning (ML). However, many standard ML approaches require a numeric representation of data and cannot be applied directly…

Refactoring tools in popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) can introduce unintended behavioral changes or compilation errors, a persistent challenge that undermines developer trust in automated transformations. Traditional…

Tracking statements in the commit history of a project is in many cases useful for supporting various software maintenance, comprehension, and evolution tasks. A high level of accuracy can facilitate the adoption of code tracking tools by…

To remain useful for their users, software systems need to continuously enhance and extend their functionality. Nevertheless, in many object-oriented applications, features are not represented explicitly. The lack of modularization is known…

Long methods that encapsulate multiple responsibilities within a single method are challenging to maintain. Choosing which statements to extract into new methods has been the target of many research tools. Despite steady improvements, these…

In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…

Code comments are the primary means to document implementation and facilitate program comprehension. Thus, their quality should be a primary concern to improve program maintenance. While much effort has been dedicated to detecting bad…

With the growth of the open-source data science community, both the number of data science libraries and the number of versions for the same library are increasing rapidly. To match the evolving APIs from those libraries, open-source…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming software engineering, with coding assistants embedded in an IDE becoming increasingly prevalent. While research has focused on improving the tools and understanding developer…

Reusing code can produce duplicate or near-duplicate code clones in code repositories. Current code clone detection techniques, like Program Dependence Graphs, rely on code structure and their dependencies to detect clones. These techniques…

This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…

Current search techniques are limited to standard RAG query-document applications. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to expand the code and index for predicting the required APIs, directly enabling high-quality, end-to-end code…

Data structures are a cornerstone of most modern programming languages. Whether they are provided via separate libraries, built into the language specification, or as part of the language's standard library -- data structures such as lists,…

Tightly coupled and interdependent systems inhibit productivity by requiring developers to carefully coordinate their changes, even when modifying subsystems that should be independent of one another. Poor architectural decisions frequently…

Prompting with natural language instructions has recently emerged as a popular method of harnessing the capabilities of large language models. Given the inherent ambiguity present in natural language, it is intuitive to consider the…