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Heavy-tailed or power-law distributions are becoming increasingly common in biological literature. A wide range of biological data has been fitted to distributions with heavy tails. Many of these studies use simple fitting methods to find…

Open Source Software (OSS) projects follow diverse lifecycle trajectories shaped by evolving patterns of contribution, coordination, and community engagement. Understanding these trajectories is essential for stakeholders seeking to assess…

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Software development as done using modern methodologies and source control management systems, has been often established as an example of self-organization, with code growing and evolving organically, through activities that do not stem…

OpenStreetMap (OSM) constitutes an unprecedented, free, geographic information source contributed by millions of individuals, resulting in a database of great volume and heterogeneity. In this study, we characterize the heterogeneity of the…

Software engineering is not an empirically based discipline. Consequently, many of its practices are based on little more than a generally agreed feeling that something may be true. Part of the problem is that it is both relatively young…

The pervasive adoption of Continuous Integration practices -- both in industry and open source projects -- has led software building to become a daily activity for thousands of developers around the world. Companies such as Microsoft have…

Quantum computing is a rapidly growing field attracting the interest of both researchers and software developers. Supported by its numerous open-source tools, developers can now build, test, or run their quantum algorithms. Although the…

Standard Time-to-Live (TTL) cache management prescribes the storage of entire files, or possibly fractions thereof, for a given amount of time after a request. As a generalization of this approach, this work proposes the storage of a…

The fine-tuning paradigm in addressing long-tail learning tasks has sparked significant interest since the emergence of foundation models. Nonetheless, how fine-tuning impacts performance in long-tail learning was not explicitly quantified.…

We introduce a simple microscopic description of software bug dynamics where users, programmers and a maintainer interact through a given program, with a particular emphasis on bug creation, detection and fixing. When the program is written…

Open-source software (OSS) projects depend on community engagement (CE) for longevity. However, CE's quantifiable impact on project dynamics and lifespan is underexplored. Objectives: This study defines CE in OSS, identifies key metrics,…

We analyze quantitatively the effect of spurious multifractality induced by the presence of fat-tailed symmetric and asymmetric probability distributions of fluctuations in time series. In the presented approach different kinds of symmetric…

Software intensively depends on external libraries whose relevance may change during its life cycle. As a consequence, software developers must periodically reconsider the libraries they depend on, and must think about \textit{library…

Filenames are a concise means of conveying information about source code to fellow developers. One such convention is util. Commonly understood to stand for "utility", filenames with the letters util are often an indication that the file…

There has been some evidence that agility is connected to the group maturity of software development teams. This study aims at conducting group development psychology training with student teams, participating in a project course at…

A considerable corpus of research on software evolution focuses on mining changes in software repositories, but omits their pre-integration history. We present a novel method for tracking this otherwise invisible evolution of software…

The continuous evolution of software projects necessitates the implementation of changes to enhance performance and reduce defects. This research explores effective strategies for learning and implementing useful changes in software…

Technical debt refers to taking shortcuts to achieve short-term goals, which might negatively influence software maintenance in the long-term. There is increasing attention on technical debt that is admitted by developers in source code…

The study of loss function distributions is critical to characterize a model's behaviour on a given machine learning problem. For example, while the quality of a model is commonly determined by the average loss assessed on a testing set,…