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We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…
Code review is a common process that is used by developers, in which a reviewer provides useful comments or points out defects in the submitted source code changes via pull request. Code review has been widely used for both industry and…
Code ownership is central to ensuring accountability and maintaining quality in large-scale software development. Yet, as external threats such as software supply chain attacks on project health and quality assurance increase, mechanisms…
Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology…
Background: Pull-based development has shaped the practice of Modern Code Review (MCR), in which reviewers can contribute code improvements, such as refactorings, through comments and commits in Pull Requests (PRs). Past MCR studies…
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…
In pull-based development systems, code reviews and pull request comments play important roles in improving code quality. In such systems, reviewers attempt to carefully check a piece of code by different unit tests. Unfortunately,…
The pull-based development process has become prevalent on platforms such as GitHub as a form of distributed software development. Potential contributors can create and submit a set of changes to a software project through pull requests.…
Change-based code review is used widely in industrial software development. Thus, research on tools that help the reviewer to achieve better review performance can have a high impact. We analyze one possibility to provide cognitive support…
Code reviews are popular in both industrial and open source projects. The benefits of code reviews are widely recognized and include better code quality and lower likelihood of introducing bugs. However, since code review is a manual…
Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…
Autonomous coding agents are reshaping software development by creating pull requests (PRs) on GitHub, referred to as agentic PRs. In parallel, the review process is also becoming autonomous, thereby making reviewer bots key actors in the…
Given the increasing number of unsuccessful pull requests in GitHub projects, insights into the success and failure of these requests are essential for the developers. In this paper, we provide a comparative study between successful and…
Context: Open source software development has become more social and collaborative, especially with the rise of social coding platforms like GitHub. Since 2016, GitHub started to support more informal methods such as emoji reactions, with…
As a maintainer of an open source software project, you are usually happy about contributions in the form of pull requests that bring the project a step forward. Past studies have shown that when reviewing a pull request, not only its…
With the advent and proliferation of online developer forums as informal documentation, developers often share their opinions about the APIs they use. Thus, opinions of others often shape the developer's perception and decisions related to…
Code reviews are central for software quality assurance. Ideally, reviewers should explain their feedback to enable authors of code changes to understand the feedback and act accordingly. Different developers might need different…
Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…
Ensuring compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a crucial aspect of software development. This task, due to its time-consuming nature and requirement for specialized knowledge, is often deferred or delegated to…
Code review is a critical software engineering practice where developers review code changes before integration to ensure code quality, detect defects, and improve maintainability. In recent years, AI agents that can understand code…