Related papers: Assessing the Bug-Proneness of Refactored Code: A …

Static bug finders have been widely-adopted by developers to find bugs in real world software projects. They leverage predefined heuristic static analysis rules to scan source code or binary code of a software project, and report violations…

Forking is a common practice for developers when building upon on already existing projects. These forks create variants, which have a common code base but then evolve the code in different directions, which is specific to that forked…

Detecting semantic interference remains a challenge in collaborative software development. Recent lightweight static analysis techniques improve efficiency over SDG-based methods, but they still suffer from a high rate of false positives. A…

Software undergoes constant changes to support new requirements, address bugs, enhance performance, and ensure maintainability. Thus, developers spend a great portion of their workday trying to understand and review the code changes of…

Bug prediction has long been considered the "prince" of empirical software engineering research, and accordingly, a substantial body of work has focused on predicting bugs to enable early preventive actions. However, most existing studies…

Dealing with merge conflicts in version control systems is a challenging task for software developers. Resolving merge conflicts is a time-consuming and error-prone process, which distracts developers from important tasks. Recent work shows…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently attracted wide interest for tackling software engineering tasks. In contrast to code generation, refactoring demands precise, semantics-preserving edits that improve program structure, which also…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

Considerable effort in software research and practice is spent on bugs. Finding, reporting, tracking, triaging, attempting to fix them automatically, detecting "bug smells" -these comprise a substantial portion of large projects' time and…

Background: Test-driven development (TDD) is a technique that repeats short coding cycles interleaved with testing. The developer first writes a unit test for the desired functionality, followed by the necessary production code, and…

Static analysis is one of the most widely adopted techniques to find software bugs before code is put in production. Designing and implementing effective and efficient static analyses is difficult and requires high expertise, which results…

Software redesign preserves functionality while improving quality attributes, but manual reuse of code and tests is costly and error-prone, especially in crossrepository redesigns. Focusing on static analyzers where cross-repo redesign…

Software remodularization through clustering is a common practice to improve internal software quality. However, the true benefit of software clustering is only realized if developers follow through with the recommended refactoring…

Debugging is a central yet complex activity in software engineering. Prior studies have documented debugging strategies and tool usage, but little theory explains how experienced developers reason about bugs in large, real-world codebases.…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

The primary value of AI agents in software development lies in their ability to extend the developer's capacity for reasoning and action, not to supplant human involvement. To showcase how to use agents working in tandem with developers, we…

Software systems are getting more complex as the system grows where maintaining such system is a primary concern for the industry. Code clone is one of the factors making software maintenance more difficult. It is a process of replicating…

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,…

Although some recent works show potential complementarity among different state-of-the-art systems, few works try to investigate this problem in text summarization. Researchers in other areas commonly refer to the techniques of reranking or…

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…