Software Engineering

During code review, developers critically examine each others’ code to improve its quality, share knowledge, and ensure conformance to coding standards. In the process, developers may have negative interpersonal interactions with their peers, which can lead to frustration and stress; these negative interactions may ultimately result in developers abandoning projects. In this mixed-methods study...

Statistical language modeling techniques have successfully been applied to large source code corpora, yielding a variety of new software development tools, such as tools for code suggestion, improving readability, and API migration. A major issue with these techniques is that code introduces new vocabulary at a far higher rate than natural language, as new identifier names proliferate. Both...

Designing usable APIs is critical to developers’ productivity and software quality, but is quite difficult. One of the challenges is that anticipating API usability barriers and real world usage is difficult, due to a lack of automated approaches to mine usability data at scale. In this paper, we focus on one particular grievance that developers repeatedly express in online discussions about...

In the context of logging, the word "structured" typically refers to the way log records are represented in a machine-readable format, such as JSON or XML. In this article, we focus on another aspect of logging structure: the message content. Computing today offers several automated ways of collecting, delivering, and processing log records from different types of systems. But modern...