VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Razvan Mihai Popescu
dblp:371/4389
· DBLP profile ↗
2ranked-venue papers
1as first author
2since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0003-6251-770XORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Investigating Autonomous Agent Contributions in the Wild: Activity Patterns and Code Change over TimeabstractThe rise of large language models for code has reshaped software development. Autonomous coding agents, able to create branches, open pull requests, and perform code reviews, now actively contribute to real-world projects. Their growing role offers a unique and timely opportunity to investigate AI-driven contributions and their effects on code quality, team dynamics, and software maintainability. In this work, we construct a novel dataset of approximately 110,000 open-source pull requests, including associated commits, comments, reviews, issues, and file changes, collectively representing millions of lines of source code. We compare five popular coding agents, including OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Google Jules, and Devin, examining how their usage differs in various development aspects such as merge frequency, edited file types, and developer interaction signals, including comments and reviews. Furthermore, we emphasize that code authoring and review are only a small part of the larger software engineering process, as the resulting code must also be maintained and updated over time. Hence, we offer several longitudinal estimates of survival and churn rates for agent-generated versus human-authored code. Ultimately, our findings indicate an increasing agent activity in open-source projects, although their contributions are associated with more churn over time compared to human-authored code. Razvan Mihai Popescu, David Gros 0001, Andrei Botocan, Rahul Pandita, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Maliheh Izadi |
MSR | 1 |
| 2024 | Language Models for Code Completion: A Practical EvaluationabstractTransformer-based language models for automatic code completion have shown great promise so far, yet the evaluation of these models rarely uses real data. This study provides both quantitative and qualitative assessments of three public code language models when completing real-world code. We first developed an open-source IDE extension, Code4Me, for the online evaluation of the models. We collected real auto-completion usage data for over a year from more than 1200 users, resulting in over 600K valid completions. These models were then evaluated using six standard metrics across twelve programming languages. Next, we conducted a qualitative study of 1690 real-world completion requests to identify the reasons behind the poor model performance. A comparative analysis of the models' performance in online and offline settings was also performed, using benchmark synthetic datasets and two masking strategies. Maliheh Izadi, Jonathan Katzy, Tim van Dam, Marc Otten, Razvan Mihai Popescu, Arie van Deursen |
ICSE | 5 |