Abstract Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) have led to the development of a new generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive amounts of data. Commercial applications (e.g., ChatGPT) have made this available to the general public, enabling the use of LLMs to produce high-quality texts for academic and professional purposes. Educational institutions are increasingly aware of students’ use of AI-generated content and are researching its impact and potential misuse. Computer Science (CS) and related fields are particularly affected, as LLMs can also generate programming code in various languages. To understand the potential impact of publicly available LLMs in CS education, we extend our previously introduced (Raihan et al. 2024), a framework comprising hundreds of programming exercise prompts and multiple-choice questions from introductory CS and programming courses. We provide experimental results on , evaluating the performance of several LLMs in generating Python code and answering basic computer science and programming questions, offering insights into the implications of this technology for CS education.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various NLP tasks and have recently expanded their impact to coding tasks, bridging the gap between natural languages (NL) and programming languages (PL). This taxonomy-based survey provides a comprehensive analysis of LLMs in the NL-PL domain, investigating how these models are utilized in coding tasks and examining their methodologies, architectures, and training processes. We propose a taxonomy-based framework that categorizes relevant concepts, providing a unified classification system to facilitate a deeper understanding of this rapidly evolving field. This survey offers insights into the current state and future directions of LLMs in coding tasks, including their applications and limitations.

Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have gained widespread popularity and usage in various software engineering tasks, including refactoring, testing, code review, and program comprehension. Despite recent studies delving into refactoring documentation in commit messages, issues, and code review, little is known about how developers articulate their refactoring needs when interacting with ChatGPT. In this paper, our goal is to explore conversations between developers and ChatGPT related to refactoring to better understand how developers identify areas for improvement in code and how ChatGPT addresses developers' needs. Our approach relies on text mining refactoring-related conversations from 17,913 ChatGPT prompts and responses, and investigating developers' explicit refactoring intention. Our results reveal that (1) developer-ChatGPT conversations commonly involve generic and specific terms/phrases; (2) developers often make generic refactoring requests, while ChatGPT typically includes the refactoring intention; and (3) various learning settings when prompting ChatGPT in the context of refactoring. We envision that our findings contribute to a broader understanding of the collaboration between developers and AI models.

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit feature requests and other tasks such as bug fixing and code review. Although recent studies explored how to document refactoring in commit messages, little is known about how developers describe their refactoring needs in issues. In this study, we aim at exploring developer-reported refactoring changes in issues to better understand what developers consider to be problematic in their code and how they handle it. Our approach relies on text mining 45,477 refactoring-related issues and identifying refactoring patterns from a diverse corpus of 77 Java projects by investigating issues associated with 15,833 refactoring operations and developers' explicit refactoring intention. Our results show that (1) developers mostly use move refactoring related terms/phrases to target refactoring-related issues; and (2) developers tend to explicitly mention the improvement of specific quality attributes and focus on duplicate code removal. We envision our findings enabling tool builders to support developers with automated documentation of refactoring changes in issues.

A key aspect of ensuring the quality of a software system is the practice of unit testing. Through unit tests, developers verify the correctness of production source code, thereby verifying the system's intended behavior under test. However, unit test code is subject to issues, ranging from bugs in the code to poor test case design (i.e., test smells). In this study, we compare and contrast the occurrences of a type of single-statement-bug-fix known as "simple stupid bugs" (SStuBs) in test and non-test (i.e., production) files in popular open-source Java Maven projects. Our results show that SStuBs occur more frequently in non-test files than in test files, with most fix-related code associated with assertion statements in test files. Further, most test files exhibiting SStuBs also exhibit test smells. We envision our findings enabling tool vendors to better support developers in improving the maintenance of test suites.

An initial study of using two measures to improve the accuracy of evolutionary couplings uncovered from version history is presented. Two measures, namely the age of a pattern and the distance among items within a pattern, are defined and used with the traditional methods for computing evolutionary couplings. The goal is to reduce the number of false positives (i.e., inaccurate or irrelevant claims of coupling). Initial observations are presented that lend evidence that these measures may have the potential to improve the results of computing evolutionary couplings.