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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…

ChatGPT has significantly impacted software development practices, providing substantial assistance to developers in a variety of tasks, including coding, testing, and debugging. Despite its widespread adoption, the impact of ChatGPT as an…

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.…

Code clones are code snippets that are identical or similar to other snippets within the same or different files. They are often created through copy-and-paste practices and modified during development and maintenance activities. Since a…

As modern software extensively uses free open source packages as dependencies, developers have to regularly pull in new third-party code through frequent updates. However, without a proper review of every incoming change, vulnerable and…

Comments are an important part of the source code and are a primary source of documentation. This has driven interest in using large bodies of comments to train or evaluate tools that consume or produce them -- such as generating oracles or…

Communities on GitHub often use issue labels as a way of triaging issues by assigning them priority ratings based on how urgently they should be addressed. The labels used are determined by the repository contributors and not standardised…

AI coding agents are increasingly acting as autonomous contributors by generating and submitting pull requests (PRs). However, we lack empirical evidence on how these agent-generated PRs differ from human contributions, particularly in how…

Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query.…

[Background] In large open-source software projects, development knowledge is often fragmented across multiple artefacts and contributors such that individual stakeholders are generally unaware of the full breadth of the product features.…

Code review is a common practice in software development and often conducted before code changes are merged into the code repository. A number of approaches for automatically recommending appropriate reviewers have been proposed to match…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

GitHub is the most widely used platform for software maintenance in the open-source community. Developers report issues on GitHub from time to time while facing difficulties. Having labels on those issues can help developers easily address…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into software development processes. The ability to generate code and submit pull requests with minimal human intervention, through the use of autonomous AI agents, is poised to…

The United Nations Consumer Protection Guidelines lists "access ... to adequate information ... to make informed choices" as a core consumer protection right. However, problematic online reviews and imperfections in algorithms that detect…

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…

Context: Code annotations have gained widespread popularity in programming languages, offering developers the ability to attach metadata to code elements to define custom behaviors. Many modern frameworks and APIs use annotations to keep…

Autonomous coding agents increasingly contribute to software development by submitting pull requests on GitHub; yet, little is known about how these contributions integrate into human-driven review workflows. We present a large empirical…

Peer code review and continuous integration often interleave with each other in the modern software quality management. Although several studies investigate how non-technical factors (e.g., reviewer workload), developer participation and…

Migration guides are a form of software documentation that helps developers address breaking changes introduced in library version updates. Prior studies have examined documents such as release notes, API reference manuals, and patch notes.…