Pre-Conference Talk(s) by Gede Artha Azriadi PRANA | HOANG Van Duc Thong

README files play an essential role in shaping a developer’s first impression of a software repository and in documenting the software project that the repository hosts. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the content of a typical README file as well as tools that can process these files automatically. To close this gap, we conduct a qualitative study involving the manual annotation of 4,226 README file sections from 393 randomly sampled GitHub repositories and we design and evaluate a classifier and a set of features that can categorize these sections automatically. We find that information discussing the ‘What’ and ‘How’ of a repository is very common, while many README files lack information regarding the purpose and status of a repository. Our multi-label classifier which can predict eight different categories achieves an F1 score of 0.746. To evaluate the usefulness of the classification, we used the automatically determined classes to label sections in GitHub README files using badges and showed files with and without these badges to twenty software professionals. The majority of participants perceived the automated labeling of sections based on our classifier to ease information discovery. This work enables the owners of software repositories to improve the quality of their documentation and it has the potential to make it easier for the software development community to discover relevant information in GitHub README files.

This is a pre-conference talk for 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering.

Software quality assurance efforts often focus on identifying defective code. To find likely defective code early, change-level defect prediction – aka. Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction – has been proposed. JIT defect prediction models identify likely defective changes and they are trained using machine learning techniques with the assumption that historical changes are similar to future ones. Most existing JIT defect prediction approaches make use of manually engineered features. Unlike those approaches, in this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework, named DeepJIT, that automatically extracts features from commit messages and code changes and use them to identify defects. Experiments on two popular software projects (i.e., QT and OPENSTACK) on three evaluation settings (i.e., cross-validation, short-period, and long-period) show that the best variant of DeepJIT (DeepJIT-Combined), compared with the best performing state-of-the-art approach, achieves improvements of 10.36-11.02% for the project QT and 9.51- 13.69% for the project OPENSTACK in terms of the Area Under the Curve (AUC).

This is a pre-conference talk for 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), co-located with 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

This work proposes PatchNet, an automated tool based on hierarchical deep learning for classifying patches by extracting features from commit messages and code changes. PatchNet contains a deep hierarchical structure that mirrors the hierarchical and sequential structure of a code change, differentiating it from the existing deep learning models on source code. PatchNet provides several options allowing users to select parameters for the training process. The tool has been validated in the context of automatic identification of stable-relevant patches in the Linux kernel and is potentially applicable to automate other software engineering tasks that can be formulated as patch classification problems. A video demonstrating PatchNet is available at https://goo.gl/CZjG6X. The PatchNet implementation is available at https://github.com/hvdthong/PatchNetTool.

This is a pre-conference talk for 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering.