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The ubiquity of computation in modern scientific research inflicts new challenges for reproducibility. While most journals now require code and data be made available, the standards for organization, annotation, and validation remain lax,…

Code search is a core software engineering task. Effective code search tools can help developers substantially improve their software development efficiency and effectiveness. In recent years, many code search studies have leveraged…

In recent years, the research community has raised serious questions about the reproducibility of scientific work. In particular, since many studies include some kind of computing work, reproducibility is also a technological challenge, not…

Software now lies at the heart of scholarly research. Here we argue that as well as being important from a methodological perspective, software should, in many instances, be recognised as an output of research, equivalent to an academic…

Our scientific knowledge is increasingly built on software output. User code which defines data analysis pipelines and computational models is essential for research in the natural and social sciences, but little is known about how to…

Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both…

Scientific software is essential to scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Abandoned (or unmaintained), buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software can…

Modern research heavily relies on software. A significant challenge researchers face is understanding the complex software used in specific research fields. We target two scenarios in this context, namely long onboarding times for newcomers…

The advancements in machine learning techniques have encouraged researchers to apply these techniques to a myriad of software engineering tasks that use source code analysis, such as testing and vulnerability detection. Such a large number…

Replication of scientific experiments is critical to the advance of science. Unfortunately, the discipline of Computer Science has never treated replication seriously, even though computers are very good at doing the same thing over and…

A large number of computational scientific research projects make use of open source software packages. However, the development process of such tools frequently differs from conventional software development; partly because of the nature…

Reproducibility, the ability to reproduce the results of published papers or studies using their computer code and data, is a cornerstone of reliable scientific methodology. Studies where results cannot be reproduced by the scientific…

Code readability and software complexity are important software quality metrics that impact other software metrics such as maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability. This paper presents an empirical study of the…

We describe two pilot studies of code review by and for scientists. Our principal findings are that scientists are enthusiastic, but need to be shown code review in action, and that just-in-time review of small code changes is more likely…

Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It aims at automatically predicting the next tokens or lines that the programmers tend to use. A good code completion tool can…

Software is increasingly produced in the form of ecosystems, collections of interdependent components maintained by a distributed community. These ecosystems act as network organizations, not markets, and thus often lack actionable…

Developing software to undertake complex, compute-intensive scientific processes requires a challenging combination of both specialist domain knowledge and software development skills to convert this knowledge into efficient code. As…

Well structured and readable source code is a pre-requisite for maintainable software and successful collaboration among developers. Static analysis enables the automated extraction of code complexity and readability metrics which can be…

Research Software Engineering (RSEng) is a key success factor in producing high-quality research software, which in turn enables and improves research outcomes. However, as a principal investigator or leader of a research group you may not…

As modern science becomes increasingly data-intensive, the ability to analyze and visualize large-scale, complex datasets is critical to accelerating discovery. However, many domain scientists lack the programming expertise required to…