Related papers: Identifier Name Similarities: An Exploratory Study

Intermediate variables can be used to break complex expressions into more manageable smaller expressions, which may be easier to understand. But it is unclear when and whether this actually helps. We conducted an experiment in which…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

Code smells are indicators of potential design flaws in source code and do not appear alone but in combination with other smells, creating complex interactions. While existing literature classifies these smell interactions into collocated,…

Variable and function names are extremely important for program comprehension. It is therefore also important to study how developers select names. But controlled experiments on naming are hindered by the need to describe to experimental…

Names are deeply tied to human identity. They can serve as markers of individuality, cultural heritage, and personal history. However, using names as a core indicator of identity can lead to over-simplification of complex identities. When…

Proper naming of methods can make program code easier to understand, and thus enhance software maintainability. Yet, developers may use inconsistent names due to poor communication or a lack of familiarity with conventions within the…

Assessing the degree of similarity of code fragments is crucial for ensuring software quality, but it remains challenging due to the need to capture the deeper semantic aspects of code. Traditional syntactic methods often fail to identify…

Identifiers, such as method and variable names, form a large portion of source code. Therefore, low-quality identifiers can substantially hinder code comprehension. To support developers in using meaningful identifiers, several…

Literature and intuition suggest that a developer's intelligence and personality have an impact on their performance in comprehending source code. Researchers made this suggestion in the past when discussing threats to validity of their…

In response to the prevailing challenges in contemporary software development, this article introduces an innovative approach to code augmentation centered around Impermanent Identifiers. The primary goal is to enhance the software…

The success of large language models for code relies on vast amounts of code data, including public open-source repositories, such as GitHub, and private, confidential code from companies. This raises concerns about intellectual property…

Text-embedding models often exhibit biases arising from the data on which they are trained. In this paper, we examine a hitherto unexplored bias in text-embeddings: bias arising from the presence of $\textit{names}$ such as persons,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes, due to their versatility, flexibility, and ability to simulate human reasoning to some extent. However, poor integration of LLM inference…

Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…

Developers relax restrictions on a type to reuse methods with other types. While type casts are prevalent, in weakly typed languages such as C++, they are also extremely permissive. Assignments where a source expression is cast into a new…

Software Interfaces are meant to describe contracts governing interactions between logic modules. Interfaces, if well designed, significantly reduce software complexity and ease maintainability . However, as software evolves, the…

Semantic knowledge of part-part and part-whole relationships in assemblies is useful for a variety of tasks from searching design repositories to the construction of engineering knowledge bases. In this work we propose that the natural…

Concise and meaningful method names are crucial for program comprehension and maintenance. However, method names may become inconsistent with their corresponding implementations, causing confusion and errors. Several deep learning…

The Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT and BERT, were proposed for natural language processing (NLP) and have shown promising results as general-purpose language models. An increasing number of industry professionals and researchers…

Code summaries are brief natural language descriptions of source code pieces. The main purpose of code summarization is to assist developers in understanding code and to reduce documentation workload. In this paper, we design a novel…