相关论文: On the Reliability of Code Comprehension Proxies

Automatically predicting how difficult it is for humans to understand a code snippet can assist developers in tasks like deciding when and where to refactor. Despite many proposed code comprehensibility metrics, studies have shown they…

Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…

In code comprehension experiments, participants are usually told at the beginning what kind of code comprehension task to expect. Describing experiment scenarios and experimental tasks will influence participants in ways that are sometimes…

Code search engines usually use readability feature to rank code snippets. There are several metrics to calculate this feature, but developers may have different perceptions about readability. Correlation between readability and…

Background: Developers spend a lot of their time on understanding source code. Static code analysis tools can draw attention to code that is difficult for developers to understand. However, most of the findings are based on non-validated…

Searching for clues, gathering evidence, and reviewing case files are all techniques used by criminal investigators to draw sound conclusions and avoid wrongful convictions. Similarly, in software engineering (SE) research, we can develop…

Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical systems where they provide answers based on in-context information derived from knowledge bases. As LLMs are increasingly envisioned as superhuman agents, their…

Part-prototype networks (e.g., ProtoPNet, ProtoTree, and ProtoPool) have attracted broad research interest for their intrinsic interpretability and comparable accuracy to non-interpretable counterparts. However, recent works find that the…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

Decompilation, the process of converting machine-level code into readable source code, plays a critical role in reverse engineering. Given that the main purpose of decompilation is to facilitate code comprehension in scenarios where the…

Scientific software-defined as computer programs, scripts, or code used in scientific research, data analysis, modeling, or simulation-has become central to modern research. However, there is limited research on the readability and…

What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with…

Understanding code represents a core ability needed for automating software development tasks. While foundation models like LLMs show impressive results across many software engineering challenges, the extent of their true semantic…

Evaluating the effectiveness of software protection is crucial for selecting the most effective methods to safeguard assets within software applications. Obfuscation involves techniques that deliberately modify software to make it more…

Understanding program code is a complicated endeavor. As such, myriad different factors can influence the outcome. Investigations of program comprehension, and in particular those using controlled experiments, have to take these factors…

Context: Developers spend most of their time comprehending source code during software development. Automatically assessing how readable and understandable source code is can provide various benefits in different tasks, such as task…

Code comprehension has been recently investigated from physiological and cognitive perspectives through the use of medical imaging. Floyd et al (i.e., the original study) used fMRI to classify the type of comprehension tasks performed by…

Over the past few years, deep learning methods have been applied for a wide range of Software Engineering (SE) tasks, including in particular for the important task of automatically predicting and localizing faults in software. With the…

LLMs demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet whether they utilize internal world models or rely on sophisticated pattern matching remains open. We study LLMs through the lens of robustness of their code understanding using a…