ASE 2023
Mon 11 - Fri 15 September 2023 Kirchberg, Luxembourg
Wed 13 Sep 2023 10:54 - 11:06 at Plenary Room 2 - Code Quality and Code Smells Chair(s): Bernd Fischer

Reading source code occupies most of developer’s daily activities. Any maintenance and evolution task requires developers to read and understand the code they are going to modify. For this reason, previous research focused on the definition of techniques to automatically assess the readability of a given snippet. However, when many unreadable code sections are detected, developers might be required to manually modify them all to improve their readability. While existing approaches aim at solving specific readability-related issues, such as improving variable names or fixing styling issues, there is still no approach to automatically suggest which actions should be taken to improve code readability. In this paper, we define the first holistic readability-improving approach. As a first contribution, we introduce a methodology for automatically identifying readability-improving commits, and we use it to build a large dataset of 122k commits by mining the whole revision history of all the projects hosted on GitHub between 2015 and 2022. We show that such a methodology has ∼86% accuracy. As a second contribution, we train and test the T5 model to emulate what developers did to improve readability. We show that our model achieves a perfect prediction accuracy between 21% and 28%. The results of a manual evaluation we performed on 500 predictions shows that when the model does not change the behavior of the input and it applies changes (34% of the cases), in the large majority of the cases (79.4%) it allows to improve code readability.

Wed 13 Sep

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

10:30 - 12:00
Code Quality and Code SmellsTool Demonstrations / Journal-first Papers / Research Papers at Plenary Room 2
Chair(s): Bernd Fischer Stellenbosch University
10:30
12m
Talk
Contextuality of Code Representation Learning
Research Papers
Yi Li New Jersey Institute of Technology, Shaohua Wang New Jersey Institute of Technology, Tien N. Nguyen University of Texas at Dallas
10:42
12m
Talk
On-the-fly Improving Performance of Deep Code Models via Input Denoising
Research Papers
Zhao Tian Tianjin University, Junjie Chen Tianjin University, Xiangyu Zhang Purdue University
Pre-print File Attached
10:54
12m
Talk
Using Deep Learning to Automatically Improve Code Readability
Research Papers
Antonio Vitale University of Molise, Italy, Valentina Piantadosi University of Molise, Simone Scalabrino University of Molise, Rocco Oliveto University of Molise
Pre-print
11:06
12m
Talk
Towards Automatically Addressing Self-Admitted Technical Debt: How Far Are We?
Research Papers
Antonio Mastropaolo Università della Svizzera italiana, Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio, Italy, Gabriele Bavota Software Institute, USI Università della Svizzera italiana
Pre-print File Attached
11:18
12m
Talk
How to Find Actionable Static Analysis Warnings: A Case Study with FindBugs
Journal-first Papers
Rahul Yedida , Hong Jin Kang UCLA, Huy Tu North Carolina State University, USA, Xueqi Yang NCSU, David Lo Singapore Management University, Tim Menzies North Carolina State University
Link to publication DOI Authorizer link Pre-print
11:30
12m
Talk
Polyglot Code Smell Detection for Infrastructure as Code with GLITCH
Tool Demonstrations
Nuno Saavedra INESC-ID and IST, University of Lisbon, João Gonçalves INESC-ID and IST, University of Lisbon, Miguel Henriques INESC-ID and IST, University of Lisbon, João F. Ferreira INESC-ID and IST, University of Lisbon, Alexandra Mendes Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto & INESC TEC
Pre-print File Attached
11:42
12m
Talk
Enhancing the defectiveness prediction of methods and classes via JIT
Journal-first Papers
Falessi Davide University of Rome Tor Vergata, Simone Mesiano Laureani University of Rome Tor Vergata, Jonida Çarka University of Rome Tor Vergata, Matteo Esposito University of Rome Tor Vergata, Daniel Alencar Da Costa University of Otago
Link to publication DOI File Attached