Related papers: The Value of Effective Pull Request Description
The risk to using third-party libraries in a software application is that much needed maintenance is solely carried out by library maintainers. These libraries may rely on a core team of maintainers (who might be a single maintainer that is…
The increasing adoption of AI coding agents has increased the number of agent-generated pull requests (PRs) merged with little or no human intervention. Although such PRs promise productivity gains, their post-merge code quality remains…
Context. Modern Code Review (MCR) is being adopted in both open source and commercial projects as a common practice. MCR is a widely acknowledged quality assurance practice that allows early detection of defects as well as poor coding…
Naming is very important in software development, as names are often the only vehicle of meaning about what the code is intended to do. A recent study on how developers choose names collected the names given by different developers for the…
Peer review meetings (PRMs) are formal meetings during which peers systematically analyze artifacts to improve their quality and report on non-conformities. This paper presents an approach based on protocol analysis for quantifying the…
Code review is a well-established and valued practice in the software engineering community contributing to both code quality and interpersonal benefits. However, there are challenges in both tools and processes that give rise to…
Several Deep Learning (DL)-based techniques have been proposed to automate code review. Still, it is unclear the extent to which these approaches can recommend quality improvements as a human reviewer. We study the similarities and…
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…
We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…
Code review is a mature practice for software quality assurance in software development with which reviewers check the code that has been committed by developers, and verify the quality of code. During the code review discussions, reviewers…
To create unit tests, it may be necessary to refactor the production code, e.g. by widening access to specific methods or by decomposing classes into smaller units that are easier to test independently. We report on an extensive study to…
We investigate a growing body of work that seeks to improve recommender systems through the use of review text. Generally, these papers argue that since reviews 'explain' users' opinions, they ought to be useful to infer the underlying…
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…
Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…
Reviews contain rich information about product characteristics and user interests and thus are commonly used to boost recommender system performance. Specifically, previous work show that jointly learning to perform review generation…
Background: Good API documentation facilities the development process, improving productivity and quality. While the topic of API documentation quality has been of interest for the last two decades, there have been few studies to map the…
With the urgent need to secure supply chains among Open Source libraries, attention has focused on mitigating vulnerabilities detected in these libraries. Although awareness has improved recently, most studies still report delays in the…
An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…
The rapid adoption of AI-powered coding assistants is transforming software development practices, yet systematic comparisons of their effectiveness across different task types and over time remain limited. This paper presents an empirical…
Many software developers rely on open source software for developing their applications and writing their source codes. Measuring an independent project's overall productivity is still an open problem for many technology companies. In this…