Related papers: An Empirical Study on the Impact of Code Duplicati…

Advances in technologies like artificial intelligence and metaverse have led to a proliferation of software systems in business and everyday life. With this widespread penetration, the carbon emissions of software are rapidly growing as…

Data contamination presents a critical barrier preventing widespread industrial adoption of advanced software engineering techniques that leverage code language models (CLMs). This phenomenon occurs when evaluation data inadvertently…

For large software systems, refactoring activities can be a challenging task, since for keeping component complexity under control the overall architecture as well as many details of each component have to be considered. Product metrics are…

The software development community has been using code quality metrics for the last five decades. Despite their wide adoption, code quality metrics have attracted a fair share of criticism. In this paper, first, we carry out a qualitative…

To refactor already working code while keeping reliability, compatibility and perhaps security, we can borrow ideas from micropass/nanopass compilers. By treating the procedure of software refactoring as composing code transformations, and…

The focus on rapid software delivery inevitably results in the accumulation of technical debt, which, in turn, affects quality and slows future development. Yet, companies with a long history of rapid delivery exist. Our primary aim is to…

Commits often involve refactorings -- behavior-preserving code modifications aiming at software design improvements. Refactoring operations pose a challenge to code reviewers, as distinguishing them from behavior-altering changes is often…

Detecting refactorings in commit history is essential to improve the comprehension of code changes in code reviews and to provide valuable information for empirical studies on software evolution. Several techniques have been proposed to…

Software development agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Agent, Devin, and OpenAI Codex are being increasingly integrated into developer workflows. While prior work has evaluated agent capabilities for code completion and…

Code readability is fundamental to software quality and maintainability. Poor readability extends development time, increases bug-inducing risks, and contributes to technical debt. With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models, AI…

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…

In recent years, defect prediction has received a great deal of attention in the empirical software engineering world. Predicting software defects before the maintenance phase is very important not only to decrease the maintenance costs but…

Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…

Docker, the industry standard for packaging and deploying applications, leverages Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to facilitate the creation of images through Dockerfiles. However, maintaining Dockerfiles presents significant…

Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have gained widespread popularity and usage in various software engineering tasks, including refactoring, testing, code review, and program comprehension. Despite recent studies delving into…

Several code summarization techniques have been proposed in the literature to automatically document a code snippet or a function. Ideally, software developers should be involved in assessing the quality of the generated summaries. However,…

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…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

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…

Refactoring is the practice of improving software quality without altering its external behavior. Developers intuitively refactor their code for multiple purposes, such as improving program comprehension, reducing code complexity, dealing…