Related papers: What Java Developers Know About Compatibility, And…

Dependencies between types in object-oriented software can be viewed as directed graphs, with types as nodes and dependencies as edges. The in-degree and out-degree distributions of such graphs have quite different forms, with the former…

Modularity is a desirable characteristic for software systems. In this article we propose to use a quantitative method from complex network sciences to estimate the coherence between the modularity of the dependency network of large open…

Programming languages often demarcate the internal sandbox, consisting of entities such as objects and variables, from the outside world, e.g., files or network. Although communication with the external world poses fundamental challenges…

During the software evolution, existing features may be adversely affected by new changes, which is well known as regression errors. Maintaining a high-quality test suite is helpful to prevent regression errors, whereas it heavily depends…

During compilation from Java source code to bytecode, some information is irreversibly lost. In other words, compilation and decompilation of Java code is not symmetric. Consequently, decompilation, which aims at producing source code from…

When writing source code, programmers have varying levels of freedom when it comes to the creation and use of identifiers. Do they habitually use the same identifiers, names that are different to those used by others? Is it then possible to…

Continuous Integration (CI) implies that a whole developer team works together on the mainline of a software project. CI systems automate the builds of a software. Sometimes a developer checks in code, which breaks the build. A broken build…

Programming courses can be challenging for first year university students, especially for those without prior coding experience. Students initially struggle with code syntax, but as more advanced topics are introduced across a semester, the…

Java projects are often built on top of various third-party libraries. If multiple versions of a library exist on the classpath, JVM will only load one version and shadow the others, which we refer to as dependency conflicts. This would…

APIs are the primary mechanism for developers to gain access to externally defined services and tools. However, previous research has revealed API misuses that violate the contract of APIs to be prevalent. Such misuses can have harmful…

This paper studies binary linear programming problems in the presence of uncertainties that may cause solution values to change during implementation. This type of uncertainty, termed implementation uncertainty, is modeled explicitly…

Vibe Coding (VC) is a form of software development assisted by generative AI, in which developers describe the intended functionality or logic via natural language prompts, and the AI system generates the corresponding source code. VC can…

Dynamic language features are widely available in programming languages to implement functionality that can adapt to multiple usage contexts, enabling reuse. Functionality such as data binding , object-relational mapping and user interface…

The security of software builds has attracted increased attention in recent years in response to incidents like solarwinds and xz. Now, several companies including Oracle and Google rebuild open source projects in a secure environment and…

The identification of vulnerabilities is an important element in the software development life cycle to ensure the security of software. While vulnerability identification based on the source code is a well studied field, the identification…

Modern programming languages, such as Java and C#, typically provide features that handle exceptions. These features separate error-handling code from regular source code and are proven to enhance the practice of software reliability,…

In managed languages, serialization of objects is typically done in bespoke binary formats such as Protobuf, or markup languages such as XML or JSON. The major limitation of these formats is readability. Human developers cannot read binary…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

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…

Re-using open-source software (OSS) can avoid reinventing the wheel, but failing to keep it up-to-date can lead to missing new features and persistent bugs or vulnerabilities that have already been resolved. The use of outdated OSS…