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Developers use and contribute to repositories on GitHub. Documentation present in the repositories serves as an important source by helping developers to understand, maintain and contribute to the project. Currently, documentation in a…

Developer turnover is inevitable on software projects and leads to knowledge loss, a reduction in productivity, and an increase in defects. Mitigation strategies to deal with turnover tend to disrupt and increase workloads for developers.…

The most popular code review tools (e.g., Gerrit and GitHub) present the files to review sorted in alphabetical order. Could this choice or, more generally, the relative position in which a file is presented bias the outcome of code…

An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…

Code review that detects and locates defects and other quality issues plays an important role in software quality control. One type of issue that may impact the quality of software is code smells. Yet, little is known about the extent to…

Context. AI-based development tools, such as GitHub Copilot, are transforming the software development process by offering real-time code suggestions. These tools promise to improve the productivity by reducing cognitive load and speeding…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained prominence in the field of software development, significantly boosting productivity and simplifying teamwork. Although prior studies have examined task-specific applications, the…

[This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to updated research available on arXiv (arXiv:1811.01918)] As the modern open-source paradigm makes it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these…

Background: Sub-optimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers may write low-quality code due to many reasons, such as lack of technical knowledge, lack of experience, time pressure, management decisions, and even unhappiness.…

Code review is an essential component of software development, playing a vital role in ensuring a comprehensive check of code changes. However, the continuous influx of pull requests and the limited pool of available reviewer candidates…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…

The availability of open-source projects facilitates developers to contribute and collaborate on a wide range of projects. As a result, the developer community contributing to such open-source projects is also increasing. Many of the…

Code comments are essential for clarifying code functionality, improving readability, and facilitating collaboration among developers. Despite their importance, comments often become outdated, leading to inconsistencies with the…

Pull Requests (PRs) are a mechanism on modern collaborative coding platforms, such as GitHub. PRs allow developers to tell others that their code changes are available for merging into another branch in a repository. A PR needs to be…

Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far,…

Context: Contemporary software development organizations lack diversity and the ratios of women in Free and open-source software (FOSS) communities are even lower than the industry average. Although the results of recent studies hint the…

Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…

Code review is a key element of quality assurance in software development. Determining the right reviewer for a given code change requires understanding the characteristics of the changed code, identifying the skills of each potential…

Project based learning (PBL) for software development (we call it software development PBL) has garnered attention as a practical educational method. A number of studies have reported on the introduction of social coding tools such as…

Due to the difficulties in replicating and scaling up qualitative studies, such studies are rarely verified. Accordingly, in this paper, we leverage the advantages of crowdsourcing (low costs, fast speed, scalable workforce) to replicate…