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Background: Open Source Software (OSS) is often seen as an option to mitigate risks of lock-ins. Yet, single-vendor OSS can still result in soft lock-ins due to knowledge asymmetries and technical barriers. Aim: This study explores actors…
Agile and DevOps are widely adopted by the industry. Hence, integrating security activities with industrial practices, such as continuous integration (CI) pipelines, is necessary to detect security flaws and adhere to regulators' demands…
Modifications to open-source software (OSS) are often provided in the form of "patch stacks" - sets of changes (patches) that modify a given body of source code. Maintaining patch stacks over extended periods of time is problematic when the…
Software bots, extensively adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers across several activities, from automating predefined tasks to generating code that aids software engineers. However, with the growing prominence…
GitHub recommends that projects adopt a security file that outlines vulnerability reporting procedures. However, the effectiveness and operational challenges of such files are not yet fully understood. This study aims to clarify the…
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…
With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…
As user demands evolve, effectively incorporating feature requests is crucial for maintaining software relevance and user satisfaction. Feature requests, typically expressed in natural language, often suffer from ambiguity or incomplete…
The usability of open-source software (OSS) is important but frequently overlooked in favor of technical and functional complexity. Argumentation can be a pivotal device for diverse stakeholders in OSS usability discussions to express…
This paper presents the results of a research study related to software system failures, with the goal of understanding how we might better evolve, maintain and support software systems in production. We have qualitatively analyzed thirty…
For teams using distributed version control systems, the right collaborative development workflows can help maintaining the long-term quality of project repositories and improving work efficiency. Despite the fact that the workflows are…
Context: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities' ability to stay viable and productive over time is pivotal for society as they maintain the building blocks that digital infrastructure, products, and services depend on.…
Due to its enormous benefits, the research and industry communities have shown an increasing interest in the Microservices Architecture (MSA) style over the last few years. Despite this, there is a limited evidence-based and thorough…
Scientific software is essential to scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Abandoned (or unmaintained), buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software can…
Background: Machine Learning (ML) systems rely on data to make predictions, the systems have many added components compared to traditional software systems such as the data processing pipeline, serving pipeline, and model training. Existing…
Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital…
Motivation: Society's dependence on Open Source Software (OSS) and the communities that maintain the OSS is ever-growing. So are the potential risks of, e.g., vulnerabilities being introduced in projects not actively maintained. By…
Despite the widespread adoption of open source software (OSS), its sustainability remains a critical concern, particularly in light of security vulnerabilities and the often inadequate end-of-service (EoS) processes for OSS projects as they…
Background: Widespread use of third-party libraries makes ecosystems like Node Package Manager (npm) critical to modern software development. However, this interconnected chain of dependencies also creates challenges: bugs in one library…
We investigate ten years of user support emails in the large-scale solver library PETSc in order to identify changes in user requests. For this purpose we assign each email thread to one or several categories describing the type of support…