Multi-agent LLM-driven systems for software development are rapidly gaining traction, offering new opportunities to enhance productivity. At Atlassian, we deployed Human-in-the-Loop Software Development Agents to resolve Jira work items and evaluated the generated code quality using functional correctness testing and GPT-based similarity scoring. This paper highlights two major challenges: the high computational costs of unit testing and the variability in LLM-based evaluations. We also propose future research directions to improve evaluation frameworks for Human-In-The-Loop software development tools.

Software vulnerabilities are prevalent in software systems, causing a variety of problems including deadlock, information loss, or system failures. Thus, early predictions of software vulnerabilities are critically important in safety-critical software systems. Various ML/DL-based approaches have been proposed to predict vulnerabilities at the file/function/method level. Recently, IVDetect (a graph-based neural network) is proposed to predict vulnerabilities at the function level. Yet, the IVDetect approach is still inaccurate and coarse-grained. In this paper, we propose LineVul, a Transformer-based line-level vulnerability prediction approach in order to address several limitations of the state-of-the-art IVDetect approach. Through an empirical evaluation of a large-scale real-world dataset with 188k+ C/C++ functions, we show that LineVul achieves (1) 160%-379% higher F1-measure for function-level predictions; (2) 12%-25% higher Top-10 Accuracy for line-level predictions; and (3) 29%-53% less [email protected]%Recall than the baseline approaches, highlighting the significant advancement of LineVul towards more accurate and more cost-effective line-level vulnerability predictions. Our additional analysis also shows that our LineVul is also very accurate (75%-100%) for predicting vulnerable functions affected by the Top-25 most dangerous CWEs, highlighting the potential impact of our LineVul in real-world usage scenarios.

Software defect prediction models are classifiers that are constructed from historical software data. Such software defect prediction models have been proposed to help developers optimize the limited Software Quality Assurance (SQA) resources and help managers develop SQA plans. Prior studies have different goals for their defect prediction models and use different techniques for generating visual explanations of their models. Yet, it is unclear what are the practitioners' perceptions of (1) these defect prediction model goals, and (2) the model-agnostic techniques used to visualize these models. We conducted a qualitative survey to investigate practitioners' perceptions of the goals of defect prediction models and the model-agnostic techniques used to generate visual explanations of defect prediction models. We found that (1) 82%-84% of the respondents perceived that the three goals of defect prediction models are useful; (2) LIME is the most preferred technique for understanding the most important characteristics that contributed to a prediction of a file, while ANOVA/VarImp is the second most preferred technique for understanding the characteristics that are associated with software defects in the past. Our findings highlight the significance of investigating how to improve the understanding of defect prediction models and their predictions. Hence, model-agnostic techniques from explainable AI domain may help practitioners to understand defect prediction models and their predictions.

A Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction model is a classifier to predict if a commit is defect-introducing. Recently, CC2Vec-a deep learning approach for Just-In-Time defect prediction-has been proposed. However, CC2Vec requires the whole dataset (i.e., training + testing) for model training, assuming that all unlabelled testing datasets would be available beforehand, which does not follow the key principles of just-in-time defect predictions. Our replication study shows that, after excluding the testing dataset for model training, the F-measure of CC2Vec is decreased by 38.5% for OpenStack and 45.7% for Qt, highlighting the negative impact of excluding the testing dataset for Just-In-Time defect prediction. In addition, CC2Vec cannot perform fine-grained predictions at the line level (i.e., which lines are most risky for a given commit). In this paper, we propose JITLine-a Just-In-Time defect prediction approach for predicting defect-introducing commits and identifying lines that are associated with that defect-introducing commit (i.e., defective lines). Through a case study of 37,524 commits from OpenStack and Qt, we find that our JITLine approach is at least 26%-38% more accurate (F-measure), 17%-51% more cost-effective (PCI@20%LOC), 70-100 times faster than the state-of-the-art approaches (i.e., CC2Vec and DeepJIT) and the fine-grained predictions at the line level by our approach are 133%-150% more accurate (Top-10 Accuracy) than the baseline NLP approach. Therefore, our JITLine approach may help practitioners to better prioritize defect-introducing commits and better identify defective lines.