Related papers: "Refactoring Runaway": Understanding and Mitigatin…
Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…
LLM-based coding agents are increasingly used to generate code, tests, and documentation. Still, their outputs can be plausible yet misaligned with developer intent and provide limited evidence for review in evolving projects. This limits…
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…
Many software systems originate as prototypes or minimum viable products (MVPs), developed with an emphasis on delivery speed and responsiveness to changing requirements rather than long-term code maintainability. While effective for rapid…
Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…
Context: Modern code review is a widely employed technique in both industrial and open-source projects, serving to enhance software quality, share knowledge, and ensure compliance with coding standards and guidelines. While code review is…
Using multiple agents was found to improve the debugging capabilities of Large Language Models. However, increasing the number of LLM-agents has several drawbacks such as increasing the running costs and rising the risk for the agents to…
Issue localization, which identifies faulty code elements such as files or functions, is critical for effective bug fixing. While recent LLM-based and LLM-agent-based approaches improve accuracy, they struggle in large-scale repositories…
Refactoring is one of the most important activities in software engineering which is used to improve the quality of a software system. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, researchers are attempting to apply deep learning…
Can LLM agents explore codebases and reason about code semantics without executing the code? We study this capability, which we call agentic code reasoning, and introduce semi-formal reasoning: a structured prompting methodology that…
While significant progress has been made in automating various aspects of software development through coding agents, there is still significant room for improvement in their bug fixing capabilities. Debugging and investigation of runtime…
Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code…
Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the…
The increasing deployment of Large Language Model (LLM) agents for complex software engineering tasks has created a need to understand their problem-solving behaviours beyond simple success metrics. While these agents demonstrate impressive…
Instructed code editing is a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). On the EditBench benchmark, 39 of 40 evaluated models obtain a task success rate (TSR) below 60 percent, highlighting a gap between general code generation…
Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…
Serializability is a well-understood concurrency control mechanism that eases reasoning about highly-concurrent database programs. Unfortunately, enforcing serializability has a high-performance cost, especially on geographically…
Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…
Data contamination presents a critical barrier preventing widespread industrial adoption of advanced software engineering techniques that leverage code language models (CLMs). This phenomenon occurs when evaluation data inadvertently…
Coding agents can generate web applications from natural-language descriptions, yet a recent benchmark study shows that generated applications fail to meet functional requirements in over 70% of cases. The core difficulty is that web…