ICSME 2023
Sun 1 - Fri 6 October 2023 Bogotá, Colombia

Readability models and tools have been proposed to measure the effort to read code. However, these models are not completely able to capture the quality improvements in code as perceived by developers. To investigate possible features for new readability models and production-ready tools, we aim to better understand the types of readability improvements performed by developers when actually improving code readability, and identify discrepancies between suggestions of automatic static tools and the actual improvements performed by developers. We collected 370 code readability improvements from 284 Merged Pull Requests (PRs) under 109 GitHub repositories and produce a catalog with 26 different types of code readability improvements, where in most of the scenarios, the developers improved the code readability to be more intuitive, modular, and less verbose. Surprisingly, SonarQube only detected 26 out of the 370 code readability improvements. This suggests that some of the catalog produced has not yet been addressed by SonarQube rules, highlighting the potential for improvement in Automatic static analysis tools (ASAT) code readability rules as they are perceived by developers.

Fri 6 Oct

Displayed time zone: Bogota, Lima, Quito, Rio Branco change

10:30 - 12:00
10:30
16m
Talk
How do Developers Improve Code Readability? An Empirical Study of Pull Requests
Research Track
Carlos Eduardo Carvalho Dantas Federal University of Uberlândia, Adriano Mendonça Rocha Federal University of Uberlândia, Marcelo De Almeida Maia Federal University of Uberlandia
10:46
11m
Talk
Summarize Me: The Future of Issue Thread Interpretation
New Ideas and Emerging Results Track
Abhishek Kumar Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Partha Pratim Das Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Partha Pratim Chakrabarti Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
10:57
11m
Talk
Bugsplainer: Leveraging Code Structures to Explain Software Bugs with Neural Machine Translation
Tool Demo Track
Parvez Mahbub Dalhousie University, Ohiduzzaman Shuvo Dalhousie University, Masud Rahman Dalhousie University, Avinash Gopal
11:08
16m
Talk
Knowledge Graph based Explainable Question Retrieval for Programming Tasks
Research Track
Mingwei Liu Fudan University, Simin Yu Fudan University, Xin Peng Fudan University, Xueying Du Fudan University, Tianyong Yang Fudan University, Huanjun Xu Fudan University, Gaoyang Zhang Fudan University
Pre-print File Attached
11:24
11m
Talk
Investigating the Impact of Vocabulary Difficulty and Code Naturalness on Program Comprehension
Registered Reports Track
Bin Lin Radboud University, Gregorio Robles Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
11:35
11m
Talk
Aligning Documentation and Q&A Forum through Constrained Decoding with Weak Supervision
New Ideas and Emerging Results Track
Rohith Pudari University of Toronto, Shiyuan Zhou University of Toronto, Iftekhar Ahmed University of California at Irvine, Zhuyun Dai Google, Shurui Zhou University of Toronto
Pre-print
11:46
14m
Live Q&A
1:1 Q&A
Research Track