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Related papers: Are Coding Agents Generating Over-Mocked Tests? An…

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Software testing is an essential part of the software development cycle to improve the code quality. Typically, a unit test consists of a test prefix and a test oracle which captures the developer's intended behaviour. A known limitation of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Michael Konstantinou , Renzo Degiovanni , Mike Papadakis

Background: Some developer activity traditionally performed manually, such as making code commits, opening, managing, or closing issues is increasingly subject to automation in many OSS projects. Specifically, such activity is often…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-31 Tapajit Dey , Sara Mousavi , Eduardo Ponce , Tanner Fry , Bogdan Vasilescu , Anna Filippova , Audris Mockus

Recently, a number of repository-level code generation benchmarks-such as CoderEval, DevEval, RepoEval, RepoBench, and LongCodeArena-have emerged to evaluate the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) beyond standalone benchmarks like…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Shanchao Liang , Yiran Hu , Nan Jiang , Lin Tan

Turning ideas into full software projects from scratch has become a popular use case for language models. Agents are being deployed to seed, maintain, and grow codebases over extended periods with minimal human oversight. Such settings…

AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kexin Sun , Hongyu Kuang , Sebastian Baltes , Xin Zhou , He Zhang , Xiaoxing Ma , Guoping Rong , Dong Shao , Christoph Treude

Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Eman Abdullah AlOmar

AI coding agents increasingly submit pull requests (Agentic-PRs) to open-source repositories, yet their performance is commonly assessed using merge and rejection outcomes alone. We hypothesized that these outcome labels do not reliably…

Modular programming, which aims to construct the final program by integrating smaller, independent building blocks, has been regarded as a desirable practice in software development. However, with the rise of recent code generation agents…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Deokyeong Kang , Ki Jung Seo , Taeuk Kim

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven code generation tools are increasingly used throughout the software development lifecycle to accelerate coding tasks. However, the security of AI-generated code using Large Language Models (LLMs) remains…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Mohammed Kharma , Soohyeon Choi , Mohammed AlKhanafseh , David Mohaisen

As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain in popularity, it is important to understand how novice programmers use them. We present a thematic analysis of 33 learners, aged 10-17, independently learning Python through 45 code-authoring tasks…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Majeed Kazemitabaar , Xinying Hou , Austin Henley , Barbara J. Ericson , David Weintrop , Tovi Grossman

With the increasing release of powerful language models trained on large code corpus (e.g. CodeBERT was trained on 6.4 million programs), a new family of mutation testing tools has arisen with the promise to generate more "natural" mutants…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Aayush Garg , Renzo Degiovanni , Mike Papadakis , Yves Le Traon

As software projects progress, quality of code assumes paramount importance as it affects reliability, maintainability and security of software. For this reason, static analysis tools are used in developer workflows to flag code quality…

Search-based test generators are effective at producing unit tests with high coverage. However, such automatically generated tests have no meaningful test and variable names, making them hard to understand and interpret by developers. On…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Matteo Biagiola , Gianluca Ghislotti , Paolo Tonella

Inductive program synthesis, or programming by example, requires synthesizing functions from input-output examples that generalize to unseen inputs. While large language model agents have shown promise in programming tasks guided by natural…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Anjiang Wei , Tarun Suresh , Jiannan Cao , Naveen Kannan , Yuheng Wu , Kai Yan , Thiago S. F. X. Teixeira , Ke Wang , Alex Aiken

With the rising demand for code quality assurance, developers are not only utilizing existing static code checkers but also seeking custom checkers to satisfy their specific needs. Nowadays, various code-checking frameworks provide…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Jun Liu , Yuanyuan Xie , Jiwei Yan , Jinhao Huang , Jun Yan , Jian Zhang

Traditionally, mutation testing generates an abundance of small deviations of a program, called mutants. At industrial systems the scale and size of Facebook's, doing this is infeasible. We should not create mutants that the test suite…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-28 Moritz Beller , Chu-Pan Wong , Johannes Bader , Andrew Scott , Mateusz Machalica , Satish Chandra , Erik Meijer

Generative LLMs have been shown to effectively power AI-based code authoring tools that can suggest entire statements or blocks of code during code authoring. In this paper we present CodeCompose, an AI-assisted code authoring tool…

Large language model (LLM)-based coding assistants have made substantial progress, yet most systems remain reactive, requiring developers to explicitly formulate their needs. Proactive coding assistants aim to infer latent developer intent…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Lehui Li , Ruixuan Jia , Guo-Ye Yang , Jia Li

With the rapidly increasing capabilities and adoption of code agents for AI-assisted coding, safety concerns, such as generating or executing risky code, have become significant barriers to the real-world deployment of these agents. To…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Chengquan Guo , Xun Liu , Chulin Xie , Andy Zhou , Yi Zeng , Zinan Lin , Dawn Song , Bo Li

Software is infamous for its poor quality and frequent occurrence of bugs. While there is no doubt that thorough testing is an appropriate answer to ensure sufficient quality, the poor state of software generally suggests that developers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Philipp Straubinger , Gordon Fraser