Related papers: Package upgrades in FOSS distributions: details an…

Open source software ecosystems consist of thousands of interdependent libraries, which users can combine to great effect. Recent work has pointed out two kinds of risks in these systems: that technical problems like bugs and…

Third-party library reuse has become common practice in contemporary software development, as it includes several benefits for developers. Library dependencies are constantly evolving, with newly added features and patches that fix bugs in…

With the increasing complexity of software systems, it becomes very difficult to install, configure, adjust, and maintain them. As systems become more interconnected and diverse, system architects are less able to predict and design the…

Computer networks have become a critical infrastructure. In fact, networks should not only meet strict requirements in terms of correctness, availability, and performance, but they should also be very flexible and support fast updates,…

In Open Source Software, resources of any project are open for reuse by introducing dependencies or copying the resource itself. In contrast to dependency-based reuse, the infrastructure to systematically support copy-based reuse appears to…

Managing large-scale software products is a complex software engineering task. The automation of the software development, release and distribution process is most beneficial in the large collaborations, where the big number of developers,…

The structures for the expression of fault-tolerance provisions into the application software are the central topic of this dissertation. Structuring techniques provide means to control complexity, the latter being a relevant factor for the…

Distributions of open source software packages dedicated to specific programming languages facilitate software development by allowing software projects to depend on the functionality provided by such reusable packages. The health of a…

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) started as an effort of communities of volunteers, but its practices have been adopted far beyond these initial scenarios. For instance, the strategic use of OSS in industry is constantly growing…

Code reviews are a critical aspect of open-source software (OSS) development, ensuring quality and fostering collaboration. This study examines perceptions, challenges, and biases in OSS code review processes, focusing on the perspectives…

Software engineering and information systems practices seek ultimately to create the flawless product. One of the tools used to improve the quality of software development is the use of metrics. In this paper, metrics retrieved from open…

In this paper, we ask the question of why the quality of commercial software, in terms of security and safety, does not measure up to that of other (durable) consumer goods we have come to expect. We examine this question through the lens…

Effort estimation models are a fundamental tool in software management, and used as a forecast for resources, constraints and costs associated to software development. For Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, effort estimation is…

Software packages developed and distributed through package managers extensively depend on other packages. These dependencies are regularly updated, for example to add new features, resolve bugs or fix security issues. In order to take full…

Due to the increasing number of attacks targeting open source library ecosystems, assisting maintainers has become a top priority. This is especially important since maintainers are usually overworked. Although the motivation of Open Source…

Reusing third-party software packages is a common practice in software development. As the scale and complexity of open-source software (OSS) projects continue to grow (e.g., Linux distributions), the number of reused third-party packages…

In many programming languages there exist countless nuances, making developers accidentally release new versions of their packages that are not backwards-compatible. Such releases can directly impact projects which are using their packages,…

Usability and user experience (UX) issues are often not well emphasized and addressed in open source software (OSS) development. There is an imperative need for supporting OSS communities to collaboratively identify, understand, and fix UX…

Software reliability analysis is performed at various stages during the process of engineering software as an attempt to evaluate if the software reliability requirements have been (or might be) met. In this report, I present a summary of…

A stack overflow occurs when a program or process tries to store more data in a buffer (or stack) than it was intended to hold. If the affected program is running with special privileges or accepts data from untrusted network hosts (e.g. a…