相关论文: Quantifying the benefits of code hints for refacto…

Automating the Extract Method refactoring (EMR) remains challenging and largely manual despite its importance in improving code readability and maintainability. Recent advances in open-source, resource-efficient Large Language Models (LLMs)…

Comments in software are critical for maintenance and reuse. But apart from prescriptive advice, there is little practical support or quantitative understanding of what makes a comment useful. In this paper, we introduce the task of…

Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is…

Legacy systems concentrate business rules, architectural decisions, and operational exceptions that often remain implicit in code, data, configuration, and maintenance practices. At the same time, language-model-based coding agents depend…

For many compiled languages, source-level types are erased very early in the compilation process. As a result, further compiler passes may convert type-safe source into type-unsafe machine code. Type-unsafe idioms in the original source and…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…

Understanding the correct API usage sequences is one of the most important tasks for programmers when they work with unfamiliar libraries. However, programmers often encounter obstacles to finding the appropriate information due to either…

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: Dependency Injection (DI) is a commonly applied mechanism to decouple classes from their dependencies in order to provide higher modularization. However, bad DI practices often lead to negative consequences, such as increasing…

Software systems are evolving by adding new functions and modifying existing functions over time. Through the evolution, the structure of software is becoming more complex and so the understandability and maintainability of software systems…

Identifiers, such as method and variable names, form a large portion of source code. Therefore, low-quality identifiers can substantially hinder code comprehension. To support developers in using meaningful identifiers, several…

Java remains one of the most popular programming languages in education. Although Java programming education is well supported by study materials, learners also need more immediate support on the problems they face in their own code. When…

To accelerate software development, much research has been performed to help people understand and reuse the huge amount of available code resources. Two important tasks have been widely studied: code retrieval, which aims to retrieve code…

Software documentation is an essential but labor intensive task that often requires a dedicated team of developers to ensure coverage and accuracy. Good documentation will help shorten the development cycle and improve the overall team…

State-of-the-art computer vision approaches rely on huge amounts of annotated data. The collection of such data is a time consuming process since it is mainly performed by humans. The literature shows that semi-automatic annotation…

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Although data-free incremental learning methods are memory-friendly, accurately estimating and counteracting representation shifts is challenging in the absence of historical data. This paper addresses this thorny problem by proposing a…

Source code summarization is the task of creating short, natural language descriptions of source code. Code summarization is the backbone of much software documentation such as JavaDocs, in which very brief comments such as "adds the…

Generating hints for incorrect code is a cognitively demanding task that fosters learning and metacognitive development. This study investigates three designs for personalized, scalable, and reflective hint-writing activities within a data…