Related papers: ChangePrism: Visualizing the Essence of Code Chang…

A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…

Developing an algorithm for a visualization prototype often involves the direct comparison of different development stages and design decisions, and even minor modifications may dramatically affect the results. While existing development…

Software repositories such as Git have become a relevant source of information for software engineer researcher. For instance, the detection of Commits that fulfill a given criterion (e.g., bugfixing commits) is one of the most frequent…

Forking is a common practice for developers when building upon on already existing projects. These forks create variants, which have a common code base but then evolve the code in different directions, which is specific to that forked…

Inspection of code changes is a time-consuming task that constitutes a big part of everyday work of software engineers. Existing IDEs provide little information about the semantics of code changes within the file editor view. Therefore…

Software visualization approaches for code reviews are often implemented as standalone applications, which use static code analysis. The goal is to visualize the structural changes introduced by a pull / merge request to facilitate the…

Commit messages are valuable resources for describing why code changes are committed to repositories in version control systems (e.g., Git). They effectively help developers understand code changes and better perform software maintenance…

A source code difference (diff) indicates changes made by comparing new and old source codes, and it can be utilized in code reviews to help developers understand the changes made to the code. Although many diff generation methods have been…

Version control systems are integral to software development, with GitHub emerging as a popular online platform due to its comprehensive project management tools, including issue tracking and pull requests. However, GitHub lacks a direct…

Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

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…

Tracking statements in the commit history of a project is in many cases useful for supporting various software maintenance, comprehension, and evolution tasks. A high level of accuracy can facilitate the adoption of code tracking tools by…

Code churn refers to the measure of the amount of code added, modified, or deleted in a project and is often used to assess codebase stability and maintainability. Program comprehension or how understandable the changes are, is equally…

Many code changes that developers make in their projects are repeated and constitute recurrent change patterns. It is of interest to collect such patterns from the version history of open-source repositories and suggest the most useful of…

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…

GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…

Software engineers have a wide variety of tools and techniques that can help them improve the quality of their code, but still, a lot of bugs remain undetected. In this paper we build on the idea that if a particular fragment of code is…

Software visualizations are usually realized as standalone and isolated tools that use embedded code viewers within the visualization. In the context of program comprehension, only few approaches integrate visualizations into code editors,…

Analyzing the code evolution of software systems is relevant for practitioners, researchers, and educators. It can help practitioners identify design trends and maintenance challenges, provide researchers with empirical data to study…

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…