Related papers: Identifier Name Similarities: An Exploratory Study

Software development is a repetitive task, as developers usually reuse or get inspiration from existing implementations. Code search, which refers to the retrieval of relevant code snippets from a codebase according to the developer's…

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…

Among the entities involved in software citation, software source code requires special attention, due to the role it plays in ensuring scientific reproducibility. To reference source code we need identifiers that are not only unique and…

Given two algorithms for the same problem, can we determine whether they are meaningfully different? In full generality, the question is uncomputable, and empirically it is muddied by competing notions of similarity. Yet, in many…

Information Retrieval (IR) plays a pivotal role in diverse Software Engineering (SE) tasks, e.g., bug localization and triaging, code retrieval, requirements analysis, etc. The choice of similarity measure is the core component of an IR…

Generative models powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a unified solution for powering both recommendation and search tasks. A key design choice in these models is how to represent items, traditionally through unique…

Software companies usually develop a set of product variants within the same family that share certain functions and differ in others. Variations across software variants occur to meet different customer requirements. Thus, software product…

Source code summarization involves creating brief descriptions of source code in natural language. These descriptions are a key component of software documentation such as JavaDocs. Automatic code summarization is a prized target of…

Code smells as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Many times they are the result of so called technical debt. Our study showed that the interest in code smells research is increasing. However, most of the publications are…

Similarity has been applied to a wide range of security applications, typically used in machine learning models. We examine the problem posed by masquerading samples; that is samples crafted by bad actors to be similar or near identical to…

Qualitative data analysis provides insight into the underlying perceptions and experiences within unstructured data. However, the time-consuming nature of the coding process, especially for larger datasets, calls for innovative approaches,…

Programmers' mental models represent their knowledge and understanding of programs, programming concepts, and programming in general. They guide programmers' work and influence their task performance. Understanding mental models is…

Name matching is a key component of systems for entity resolution or record linkage. Alternative spellings of the same names are a com- mon occurrence in many applications. We use the largest collection of genealogy person records in the…

Code completion is one of the most useful features in the Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), which can accelerate software development by suggesting the next probable token based on the contextual code in real-time. Recent studies…

An agile approach has become very popular over the last decade, which requires good communication and teamwork within teams as well as with outside stakeholders. Therefore, social interaction is central for a software development team to be…

This paper investigates contextual word representation models from the lens of similarity analysis. Given a collection of trained models, we measure the similarity of their internal representations and attention. Critically, these models…

Code cloning, the duplication of code fragments, is common in software development. While some reuse aids productivity, excessive cloning hurts maintainability and introduces bugs. Hence, automatic code clone detection is vital. Meanwhile,…

Learning neural program embeddings is key to utilizing deep neural networks in program languages research --- precise and efficient program representations enable the application of deep models to a wide range of program analysis tasks.…

The way developers collaborate inside and particularly across teams often escapes management's attention, despite a formal organization with designated teams being defined. Observability of the actual, organically formed engineering…

The source code of a program not only defines its semantics but also contains subtle clues that can identify its author. Several studies have shown that these clues can be automatically extracted using machine learning and allow for…