Exploration of the code review process:: Can a code review checklist improve the process?

In the software engineering field the code review process has been widely adopted as a quality control, in the current day code reviews have also multiple additional advantages. In this research we explored how the code review process is used at Greenchoice, a Dutch energy supplier. Subsequently, we created a code review checklist which was used...

Promises and Perils of Inferring Personality on GitHub

Background: Personality plays a pivotal role in our understanding of human actions and behavior. Today, the applications of personality are widespread, built on the solutions from psychology to infer personality. Aim: In software engineering, for instance, one widely used solution to infer personality uses textual communication data. As studies...

An Extension of CodeFeedr

CodeFeedr is a Mining Software Repository (MSR) tool designed to efficiently mine massive amounts of streaming data of projects from various sources using Flink’s streaming framework in combination with Kafka. Commissioned by researchers at TU Delft on the field of Data Science and Software Engineering, the goal of this project was to expand...

Toward a Smell-aware Bug Prediction Model

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Previous studies empirically assessed the impact of smells on code quality and clearly indicate their negative impact on maintainability, including a higher bug-proneness of components affected by code smells. In this paper, we capture previous findings on bug-proneness to...

Fine-grained just-in-time defect prediction

Defect prediction models focus on identifying defect-prone code elements, for example to allow practitioners to allocate testing resources on specific subsystems and to provide assistance during code reviews. While the research community has been highly active in proposing metrics and methods to predict defects on long-term periods (i.e.,at...

Information Needs in Contemporary Code Review

Contemporary code review is a widespread practice used by software engineers to maintain high software quality and share project knowledge. However, conducting proper code review takes time and developers often have limited time for review. In this paper, we aim at investigating the information that reviewers need<br/>to conduct a proper code...

Schaapi: Early detection of breaking changes based on API usage

Library developers are often unaware of how their library is used exactly in practice. When a library developer changes the internals of a library, this may unintentionally affect or even break the working of the library users' code. While it is possible to detect when a syntactic breaking change occurs, it is not as easy to detect semantic...

The Scent of a Smell: An Extensive Comparison between Textual and Structural Smells

Code smells are symptoms of poor design or implementation choices that have a negative effect on several aspects of software maintenance and evolution, such as program comprehension or change- and fault-proneness. This is why researchers have spent a lot of effort on devising methods that help developers to automatically detect them in source...

A Graph-based Dataset of Commit History of Real-World Android apps

Obtaining a good dataset to conduct empirical studies on the engineering of Android apps is an open challenge. To start tackling this challenge, we present AndroidTimeMachine, the first, self-contained, publicly available dataset weaving spread-out data sources about real-world, open-source Android apps. Encoded as a graph-based database,...

Enhancing Change Prediction Models using Developer-Related Factors

Continuous changes applied during software maintenance risk to deteriorate the structure of a system and are a threat to its maintainability. In this context, predicting the portions of source code where specific maintenance operations should be focused on may be crucial for developers to prevent maintainability issues. Previous work proposed...

PyDriller: Python Framework for Mining Software Repositories

Software repositories contain historical and valuable information about the overall development of software systems. Mining software repositories (MSR) is nowadays considered one of the most interesting growing fields within software engineering. MSR focuses on extracting and analyzing data available in software repositories to uncover...

Mining File Histories: Should we consider branches?

Modern distributed version control systems, such as Git, offer support for branching — the possibility to develop parts of software outside the master trunk. Consideration of the repository structure in Mining Software Repository (MSR) studies requires a thorough approach to mining, but there is no well-documented, widespread methodology...

A Case for Deep Learning in Mining Software Repositories

Repository mining researchers have successfully applied machine learning in a variety of<br/>scenarios.  However, the use of deep learning in repository mining tasks is still in its infancy.<br/>In this thesis, we describe the advantages and disadvantages of using deep learning in mining software repository research and demonstrate these by...

On the diffuseness and the impact on maintainability of code smells: A large scale empirical investigation

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices that may hinder code comprehensibility and maintainability. Despite the effort devoted by the research community in studying code smells, the extent to which code smells in software systems affect software maintainability remains still unclear. In this paper we present a large...

Developer-Related Factors in Change Prediction: An Empirical Assessment

Predicting the areas of the source code having a higher likelihood to change in the future is a crucial activity to allow developers to plan preventive maintenance operations such as refactoring or peer-code reviews. In the past the research community was active in devising change prediction models based on structural metrics extracted from the...

On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a tremendous resource—that is, when they are stable. Several studies have shown that this is unfortunately not the case. Of those, a large-scale study of API changes in the Pharo Smalltalk<br/>ecosystem documented several findings about API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We conduct a...

A security perspective on code review: The case of Chromium

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an established software development process that aims to improve software quality. Although evidence showed that higher levels of review coverage relates to less post-release bugs, it remains unknown the effectiveness of MCR at specifically finding security issues. We present a work we conduct aiming to fill that gap...

fine-GRAPE: Fine-Grained APi usage Extractor An Approach and Dataset to Investigate API Usage

An Application Programming Interface (API) provides a specific set of functionalities to a developer, with the aim of enabling reuse. APIs have been investigated from different angles such as popularity usage and evolution, to get a better understanding of their various characteristics. For such studies software repositories are mined for API...