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Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Danilo Silva , Marco Tulio Valente

Automating the Extract Method refactoring (EMR) remains challenging and largely manual despite its importance in improving code readability and maintainability. Recent advances in open-source, resource-efficient Large Language Models (LLMs)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Sivajeet Chand , Melih Kilic , Roland Würsching , Sushant Kumar Pandey , Alexander Pretschner

Fixing bugs in large programs is a challenging task that demands substantial time and effort. Once a bug is found, it is reported to the project maintainers, who work with the reporter to fix it and eventually close the issue. However,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Qiushi Wu , Yue Xiao , Dhilung Kirat , Kevin Eykholt , Jiyong Jang , Douglas Lee Schales

In recent years, Large language model-powered Automated Program Repair (LAPR) techniques have achieved state-of-the-art bug-fixing performance and have been pervasively applied and studied in both industry and academia. Nonetheless, LLMs…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Pengyu Xue , Linhao Wu , Zhen Yang , Zhongxing Yu , Zhi Jin , Ge Li , Yan Xiao , Shuo Liu , Xinyi Li , Hongyi Lin , Jingwen Wu

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian D. Newman , Ali Ouni

Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Mikel Robredo , Matteo Esposito , Fabio Palomba , Rafael Peñaloza , Valentina Lenarduzzi

Current compiler optimization reports often present complex, technical information that is difficult for programmers to interpret and act upon effectively. This paper assesses the capability of large language models (LLM) to understand…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Peter Pirkelbauer , Chunhua Liao

Debugging is an essential skill when learning to program, yet its instruction and emphasis often vary widely across introductory courses. In the era of code-generating large language models (LLMs), the ability for students to reason about…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Victor-Alexandru Pădurean , Paul Denny , Adish Singla

Logging code is written by developers to capture system runtime behavior and plays a vital role in debugging, performance analysis, and system monitoring. However, defects in logging code can undermine the usefulness of logs and lead to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Xin Wang , Zhenhao Li , Zishuo Ding

Static analysis tools, or linters, detect violation of source code conventions to maintain project readability. Those tools automatically fix specific violations while developers edit the source code. However, existing tools are designed…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-05-25 Yuki Ueda , Takashi Ishio , Akinori Ihara , Kenichi Matsumoto

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…

Just-in-time defect prediction (JIT-DP) aims to predict the likelihood of code changes resulting in software defects at an early stage. Although code change metrics and semantic features have enhanced prediction accuracy, prior research has…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Feifei Niu , Junqian Shao , Christoph Mayr-Dorn , Liguo Huang , Wesley K. G. Assunção , Chuanyi Li , Jidong Ge , Alexander Egyed

The software compilation process has a tendency to obscure the original design of the system and makes it difficult both to identify individual components and discern their purpose simply by examining the resulting binary code. Although…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Sima Arasteh , Pegah Jandaghi , Nicolaas Weideman , Dennis Perepech , Mukund Raghothaman , Christophe Hauser , Luis Garcia

Failure-inducing inputs play a crucial role in diagnosing and analyzing software bugs. Bug reports typically contain these inputs, which developers extract to facilitate debugging. Since bug reports are written in natural language, prior…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Alif Al Hasan , Subarna Saha , Mia Mohammad Imran , Tarannum Shaila Zaman

Software testing is a core discipline in software engineering where a large array of research results has been produced, notably in the area of automatic test generation. Because existing approaches produce test cases that either can be…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Laura Plein , Wendkûuni C. Ouédraogo , Jacques Klein , Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in code generation recently, offering programmers revolutionary assistance in software development. However, due to the auto-regressive nature of LLMs, they are susceptible…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Xue Jiang , Yihong Dong , Yongding Tao , Huanyu Liu , Zhi Jin , Wenpin Jiao , Ge Li

Like humans, large language models (LLMs) do not always generate the best output on their first try. Motivated by how humans refine their written text, we introduce Self-Refine, an approach for improving initial outputs from LLMs through…

Humans constantly restructure knowledge to use it more efficiently. Our goal is to give a machine learning system similar abilities so that it can learn more efficiently. We introduce the \textit{knowledge refactoring} problem, where the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Sebastijan Dumancic , Tias Guns , Andrew Cropper

Code review is a key development practice that contributes to improve software quality and to foster knowledge sharing among developers. However, code review usually takes time and demands detailed and time-consuming analysis of textual…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Rodrigo Brito , Marco Tulio Valente

Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While several studies propose refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Tianjia Wang , Vaibhavi Raut , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni