Related papers: Anonymized e-mail interviews with R package mainta…
The paper presents a traceability analysis of how over 84 thousand vulnerabilities have propagated across 28 open source software ecosystems. According to the results, the propagation sequences have been complex in general, although GitHub,…
The increasing availability of cloud computing and scientific super computers brings great potential for making R accessible through public or shared resources. This allows us to efficiently run code requiring lots of cycles and memory, or…
Authors of malicious software are not hiding as much as one would assume: they have a visible online footprint. Apart from online forums, this footprint appears in software development platforms, where authors create publicly-accessible…
R and Python are among the most popular languages used in many critical data analytics tasks. However, we still do not fully understand the capabilities of these two languages w.r.t. bugs encountered in data analytics tasks. What type of…
R packages are the fundamental units of reproducible code in R, providing a mechanism for distributing user-developed code, documentation, and data. Docker is a virtualization technology that allows applications and their dependencies to be…
Social Coding Platforms (SCPs) like GitHub have become central to modern software engineering thanks to their collaborative and version-control features. Like in mainstream Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, users of SCPs are…
Malicious attacks on open-source software packages are a growing concern. The discovery of the XZ Utils backdoor intensified these concerns because of the potential widespread impact. This study, therefore, explores the challenges of…
In the context of modern software engineering, there is a trend towards Cloud-native software development involving international teams with members from all over the world. Cloud-based version management services like GitHub are commonly…
While many forms of financial support are currently available, there are still many complaints about inadequate financing from software maintainers. In May 2019, GitHub, the world's most active social coding platform, launched the Sponsor…
GitHub is the most widely used social, distributed version control system. It has around 10 million registered users and hosts over 16 million public repositories. Its user base is also very active as GitHub ranks in the top 100 Alexa most…
Science depends on collaboration, result reproduction, and the development of supporting software tools. Each of these requires careful management of software versions. We present a unified model for installing, managing, and publishing…
Quantum computing is rapidly advancing, but quantum software development faces significant challenges, including a steep learning curve, high hardware error rates, and a lack of mature engineering practices. This study conducts a…
A large user base relies on software updates provided through package managers. This provides a unique lever for improving the security of the software update process. We propose a transparency system for software updates and implement it…
To evaluate software maintenance techniques and tools in controlled experiments with human participants, researchers currently use projects and tasks selected on an ad-hoc basis. This can unrealistically favor their tool, and it makes the…
Static analysis is a classical technique for improving software security and software quality in general. Fairly recently, a new static analyzer was implemented in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The present paper uses the GCC's analyzer…
As modern software extensively uses open source packages, developers regularly pull in new upstream code through frequent updates. While a manual review of all upstream changes may not be practical, developers may rely on the authors' and…
Modern programming languages like Java require runtime systems to support the implementation and deployment of software applications in diverse computing platforms and operating systems. These runtime systems are normally developed in…
GitHub has become the central online platform for much of open source, hosting most open source code repositories. With this popularity, the public digital traces of GitHub are now a valuable means to study teamwork and collaboration. In…
Software is often developed using versioned controlled software, such as Git, and hosted on centralized Web hosts, such as GitHub and GitLab. These Web hosted software repositories are made available to users in the form of traditional HTML…
Context: Privacy legislation has impacted the way software systems are developed, prompting practitioners to update their implementations. Specifically, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy…