Related papers: Fat tails, long memory, maturity and ageing in ope…
Throughout the history of software, evolution has occurred in cycles of rise and fall driven by competition, and open-source software (OSS) is no exception. This cycle is accelerating, particularly in rapidly evolving domains such as web…
Established Open Source Software (OSS) projects can grow in size if new developers join, but also the number of OSS projects can grow if developers choose to found new projects. We discuss to what extent an established model for firm growth…
Context: Technical lag accumulates when software systems fail to keep pace with technological advancements, leading to a deterioration in software quality. Objective: This paper aims to consolidate existing research on technical lag,…
We study the large-time asymptotic of renewal-reward processes with a heavy-tailed waiting time distribution. It is known that the heavy tail of the distribution produces an extremely slow dynamics, resulting in a singular large deviation…
The Open Source Software movement has been growing exponentially for a number of years with no signs of slowing. Driving this growth is the widespread availability of libraries and frameworks that provide many functionalities. Developers…
This paper uses firm-level data recorded in the AMADEUS database to investigate the distribution of labour productivity in different European countries. We find that the upper tail of the empirical productivity distributions follows a…
Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) refers to the phenomenon where developers explicitly acknowledge technical debt through comments in the source code. While considerable research has focused on detecting and addressing SATD, its true…
The durability and quality of software contributions are critical factors in the long-term maintainability of a codebase. This paper introduces the Time to Modification (TTM) Theory, a novel approach for quantifying code quality by…
Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created - and maintained - synchronously. In this paper we investigate whether production code and the accompanying tests co-evolve by…
This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…
Learning-based techniques, especially advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) for code, have gained considerable popularity in various software engineering (SE) tasks. However, most existing works focus on designing better learning-based…
For many optimization algorithms the time-to-solution depends not only on the problem size but also on the specific problem instance and may vary by many orders of magnitude. It is then necessary to investigate the full distribution and…
The long-term sustainability of research software is a critical challenge, as it usually suffers from poor maintainability, lack of adaptability, and eventual obsolescence. This paper proposes a novel approach to addressing this issue by…
Stock markets can be characterized by fat tails in the volatility distribution, clustering of volatilities and slow decay of their time correlations. For an explanation models with several mechanisms and consequently many parameters as the…
Easy and mostly free access to the internet has resulted in the growing use of open source software (OSS). However, it is a common perception that closed proprietary software is still superior in areas such as software maintenance and…
We consider the tail distribution of the edge cover time of a specific non-Markov process, $\delta$ once-reinforced random walk, on finite connected graphs, whose transition probability is proportional to weights of edges. Here the weights…
Context: Open-source ecosystems rely on sustained package maintenance. When maintenance slows or stops, Technical Lag (TL), the gap between installed and latest dependency versions accumulates, creating security and sustainability risks.…
We show that the quotient of Levy processes of jump-diffusion type has a fat-tailed distribution. An application is to price theory in economics. We show that fat tails arise endogenously from modeling of price change based on an excess…
Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…
Understanding the collective social behavior of software developers is crucial to model and predict the long-term dynamics and sustainability of Open Source Software (OSS) communities. To this end, we analyze temporal activity patterns of…