Related papers: Automated Code Review Assignments: An Alternative …

The most popular code review tools (e.g., Gerrit and GitHub) present the files to review sorted in alphabetical order. Could this choice or, more generally, the relative position in which a file is presented bias the outcome of code…

Code generation tools driven by artificial intelligence have recently become more popular due to advancements in deep learning and natural language processing that have increased their capabilities. The proliferation of these tools may be a…

In open-source software (OSS), software vulnerabilities have significantly increased. Although researchers have investigated the perspectives of vulnerability reporters and OSS contributor security practices, understanding the perspectives…

AI coding agents are reshaping software development through both autonomous and human-mediated pull requests (PRs). When developers use AI agents to generate code under their own accounts, code authorship attribution becomes critical for…

Repository-level code review requires reasoning over project structure, repository context, and file-level implementation details. Existing automated review workflows often collapse these tasks into a single pass, which can reduce…

Code review is a widespread practice to improve software quality and transfer knowledge. It is often seen as time-consuming due to the need for manual effort and potential delays. Several AI-assisted tools, such as Qodo, GitHub Copilot, and…

Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is…

Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…

As software development practices increasingly adopt AI-powered tools, ensuring that such tools can support secure coding has become critical. This study evaluates the effectiveness of GitHub Copilot's recently introduced code review…

Typical users are known to use and reuse weak passwords. Yet, as cybersecurity concerns continue to rise, understanding the password practices of software developers becomes increasingly important. In this work, we examine developers'…

Code review is a widely-used practice in software development companies to identify defects. Hence, code review has been included in many software engineering curricula at universities worldwide. However, teaching code review is still a…

README files play an essential role in shaping a developer's first impression of a software repository and in documenting the software project that the repository hosts. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the content of a typical…

Identifying and addressing security issues during the early phase of the development lifecycle is critical for mitigating the long-term negative impacts on software systems. Code review serves as an effective practice that enables…

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…

Where can we find malware source code? This question is motivated by a real need: there is a dearth of malware source code, which impedes various types of security research. Our work is driven by the following insight: public archives, like…

In Open Source Software, resources of any project are open for reuse by introducing dependencies or copying the resource itself. In contrast to dependency-based reuse, the infrastructure to systematically support copy-based reuse appears to…

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

GitHub is the most widely used platform for software maintenance in the open-source community. Developers report issues on GitHub from time to time while facing difficulties. Having labels on those issues can help developers easily address…

Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While several studies propose refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how…

Software engineering agents have shown significant promise in writing code. As AI agents permeate code writing, and generate huge volumes of code automatically -- the matter of code quality comes front and centre. As the automatically…