Related papers: Refactoring-Aware Patch Integration Across Structu…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

Refactoring is an essential activity during software evolution. Frequently, practitioners rely on such transformations to improve source code maintainability and quality. As a consequence, this process may produce new source code entities…

Despite the immense popularity of the Automated Program Repair (APR) field, the question of patch validation is still open. Most of the present-day approaches follow the so-called Generate-and-Validate approach, where first a candidate…

Refactoring is the art of improving the design of a system without altering its external behavior. Refactoring has become a well established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research…

In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…

A version control system, such as Git, requires a way to integrate changes from different developers or branches. Given a merge scenario, a merge tool either outputs a clean integration of the changes, or it outputs a conflict for manual…

Detecting semantic interference remains a challenge in collaborative software development. Recent lightweight static analysis techniques improve efficiency over SDG-based methods, but they still suffer from a high rate of false positives. A…

Benchmarks of bugs are essential to empirically evaluate automatic program repair tools. In this paper, we present Bears, a project for collecting and storing bugs into an extensible bug benchmark for automatic repair studies in Java. The…

Software undergoes constant changes to support new requirements, address bugs, enhance performance, and ensure maintainability. Thus, developers spend a great portion of their workday trying to understand and review the code changes of…

Developers often change types of program elements. Such refactoring often involves updating not only the type of the element itself, but also the API of all type-dependent references in the code, thus it is tedious and time-consuming.…

This report investigates the relationship between software refactoring and behavior preservation. Existing behavior preservation analyses often lack comprehensive insights into refactoring rejections and do not provide actionable solutions.…

With the rapid development of deep learning, the implementation of intricate algorithms and substantial data processing have become standard elements of deep learning projects. As a result, the code has become progressively complex as the…

Python is a widely adopted programming language, valued for its simplicity and flexibility. However, its dynamic type system poses significant challenges for automated refactoring - an essential practice in software evolution aimed at…

In the field of automated program repair, the redundancy assumption claims large programs contain the seeds of their own repair. However, most redundancy-based program repair techniques do not reason about the repair ingredients---the code…

Context: Downloading the source code of open-source Java projects and building them on a local computer using Maven, Gradle, or Ant is a common activity performed by researchers and practitioners. Multiple studies so far found that about…

Software development agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Agent, Devin, and OpenAI Codex are being increasingly integrated into developer workflows. While prior work has evaluated agent capabilities for code completion and…

In modern software engineering, build systems play the crucial role of facilitating the conversion of source code into software artifacts. Recent research has explored high-level causes of build failures, but has largely overlooked the…

Automatic identification of the differences between two versions of a file is a common and basic task in several applications of mining code repositories. Git, a version control system, has a diff utility and users can select algorithms of…

Code review is a key development practice that contributes to improve software quality and to foster knowledge sharing among developers. However, code review usually takes time and demands detailed and time-consuming analysis of textual…

Code analyzers such as Error Prone and FindBugs detect code patterns symptomatic of bugs, performance issues, or bad style. These tools express patterns as quick fixes that detect and rewrite unwanted code. However, it is difficult to come…