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Static bug detection tools help developers detect code problems. However, it is known that they remain underutilized due to various reasons. Recent advances to incorporate static bug detectors in modern software development workflows can…

Catalogs of refactoring have key importance in software maintenance and evolution, since developers rely on such documents to understand and perform refactoring operations. Furthermore, these catalogs constitute a reference guide for…

Python is a popular high-level general-purpose programming language also heavily used by the scientific community. It supports a variety of different programming paradigms and is preferred by many for its ease of use. With the vision of…

Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance, and is usually performed to enforce better design and coding practices, while coping with design defects. The Extract Method refactoring is widely used for merging duplicate code…

This paper presents a large-scale study that investigates the bug resolution characteristics among popular Github projects written in different programming languages. We explore correlations but, of course, we cannot infer causation.…

In light of the growing interest in type inference research for Python, both researchers and practitioners require a standardized process to assess the performance of various type inference techniques. This paper introduces TypeEvalPy, a…

Modern programming languages, such as Python, support language features from several paradigms, such as object-oriented, procedural, and functional. Research has shown that code written in some paradigms can be harder to comprehend, but to…

One problem when studying how to find and fix syntax errors is how to get natural and representative examples of syntax errors. Most syntax error datasets are not free, open, and public, or they are extracted from novice programmers and do…

Bug reports are a popular target for natural language processing (NLP). However, bug reports often contain artifacts such as code snippets, log outputs and stack traces. These artifacts not only inflate the bug reports with noise, but often…

Maintenance is a dominant component of software cost, and localizing reported defects is a significant component of maintenance. We propose a scalable approach that leverages the natural language present in both defect reports and source…

Bugs are essential in software engineering; many research studies in the past decades have been proposed to detect, localize, and repair bugs in software systems. Effectiveness evaluation of such techniques requires complex bugs, i.e.,…

Software is used in critical applications in our day-to-day life and it is important to ensure its correctness. One popular approach to assess correctness is to evaluate software on tests. If a test fails, it indicates a fault in the…

Failure studies are important in revealing the root causes, behaviors, and life cycle of defects in software systems. These studies either focus on understanding the characteristics of defects in specific classes of systems or the…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), make it potentially feasible to automatically refactor source code with LLMs. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs perform compared to human experts in conducting refactorings…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…

Developers create bug-reproducing tests that support debugging by failing as long as the bug is present, and passing once the bug has been fixed. These tests are usually integrated into existing test suites and executed regularly alongside…

Developers often refactor source code to improve its quality during software development. A challenge in refactoring is to determine if it can be applied or not. To help with this decision-making process, we aim to search for past…

Python applications depend on third-party native libraries that may be vendored within package distributions or installed on the host system. When vulnerabilities are discovered in these native libraries, determining which Python packages…

Code refactoring is a fundamental software engineering practice aimed at improving code quality and maintainability. Despite its importance, developers often neglect refactoring due to the significant time, effort, and resources it…

Static analysis plays a crucial role in software vulnerability detection, yet faces a persistent precision-scalability tradeoff. In large codebases like the Linux kernel, traditional static analysis tools often generate excessive false…