Dror G. Feitelson’s research while affiliated with Hebrew University of Jerusalem and other places

... Additionally, they observed that over 40% of field and variable names were not initialized at declaration time. Feitelson et al. [19] examined the distribution of the name length and scope of variable identifiers of Java projects. Their analysis of data from approximately 1,000 Java projects revealed that the wider the scope, the more words incorporated into identifiers, and words comprising six or more letters were often abbreviated. ...

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RENAS: Prioritizing Co-Renaming Opportunities of Identifiers

... Knowing there could be community trust issues, we looked to prior work in analogous contexts to guide us on ethical best practices when working with administrators and engaging with instances as research subjects. We followed the principles outlined in Feitelson [27]'s postincident survey of open source developers; these principles align with previously-published recommendations for research on Reddit, which evoke community-based participatory research [75,99]. ...

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Privacy Policies on the Fediverse: A Case Study of Mastodon Instances

... We consider this a benefit for our comparison, since scientific writing uses clear and explicit language, where each paragraph follows logically from the one before (Lindsay 2020;Gustavii 2017), and the goal of scientific writing is to inform the reader, so it should avoid using "flowery, ornate or obscure prose" (Lindsay 2020). Similarly, programming naturally requires that information and the goals are explicitly expressed such that a computer can process it as well as a human reader can understand it, which is relevant, for example, when choosing identifier names Schankin et al. 2018;Beniamini et al. 2017). Thus, there are some parallels between programming and scientific writing, making scientific writing a good base to relate it to programming, even if one might think of prose first when the keyword 'writing' comes up. ...

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Toward a theory on programmer’s block inspired by writer’s block

... And renaming, where a maintainer changes a previously given name, is a common form of refactoring [7,24]. Additional research has considered how easy it is to remember names [12,15], and whether similar names may cause confusion [28,5]. In all these contexts it is important to be able to compare names to each other. ...

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When Are Names Similar Or the Same? Introducing the Code Names Matcher Library

... As discussed elsewhere [26], this is a scenario that hints at practical relevance, especially considering the very low p-value (< 0.003). Further studies investigating these code patterns, potentially using different response variables [30,31], are left for future work. ...

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Runtime Verification of Crypto APIs: An Empirical Study

... During the evolution of any OSS project, including Blockchain, developers typically change their role in the project (De Filippi & Loveluck, 2016). This phenomenon led to two categories of developers: (a) peripheral developers, whose role is to contribute code but cannot commit to the project directly, and (b) committers, who have permission to not only contribute but also commit code to the project directly (Amit & Feitelson, 2021). Therefore, committers conduct most of the maintenance tasks and constitute important key actors in the evolution of Blockchain software projects (Barraood et al., 2022). ...

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Committer Assessment Practice in Blockchain Project: A Systematic Literature Review

... For example, Wyrich et al. found 95 studies that measured bottom-up code comprehension using human participants [43]. However such experiments must be performed with care as they are difficult to do well [11,35,36]. ...

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On the comprehensibility of functional decomposition: An empirical study

... In Feitelson's experience, the selected names were strongly influenced by the words used in the scenario descriptions. Regev et al. (Regev et al. 2021) extended the previous research: instead of using languages such as Hebrew and English, they used emojis and graphs in the scenario descriptions. The motivation was to reduce the accessibility bias by not introducing any intermediate words, considering that emojis represent a universal mode of communication. ...

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Understanding Class Name Regularity: A Simple Heuristic and Supportive Visualization.

... Many researchers have examined a wide variety of factors that could potentially affect readability. Some research has shown that the impact of a name on readability depends not only on how good or bad it is, but other factors such as the role it plays within the code, where it appears, its length, and its type can also play a role (Avidan and Feitelson 2017;Schankin et al. 2018;Cates et al. 2021). Apart from naming, many other coding practices have been analyzed. ...

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An eye tracking study assessing source code readability rules for program comprehension

... The open-source software may differ in system comprehension, and further research is required to understand the open-source software. This study is essential because open-source development is more evolutionary, less planned, and less documented than large-scale software [7]. This paper will discuss a new technique to facilitate opensource software understanding. ...

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Multi-Language Program Understanding Tool