On the "Naturalness" of Buggy Code

• Published in: Proceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 428 - 439
• Main Authors: Ray, Baishakhi, Hellendoorn, Vincent, Godhane, Saheel, Zhaopeng Tu, Bacchelli, Alberto, Devanbu, Premkumar
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: ACM 01.05.2016
• Subjects: Biological system modeling; Computer bugs; Entropy; Inspection; Predictive models; Software
• ISSN: 1558-1225
• DOI: 10.1145/2884781.2884848

Real software, the kind working programmers produce by the kLOC to solve real-world problems, tends to be "natural", like speech or natural language; it tends to be highly repetitive and predictable. Researchers have captured this naturalness of software through statistical models and used...