Related papers: Why and How Java Developers Break APIs

Background: Agile software development has become a popular way of developing software. Scrum is the most frequently used agile framework, but it is often reported to be adapted in practice. Objective: Thus, we aim to understand how Scrum…

Dependencies between modules can trigger ripple effects when changes are made, making maintenance complex and costly, so minimizing these dependencies is crucial. Consequently, understanding what drives dependencies is important. One…

Modern applications increasingly interact with web APIs -- reusable components, deployed and operated outside the application, and accessed over the network. Their existence, arguably, spurs application innovations, making it easy to…

Reusing code is a common practice in software development: It helps developers speedup the implementation task while also reducing the chances of introducing bugs, given the assumption that the reused code has been tested, possibly in…

Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the…

In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones that…

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…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…

Currently, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are becoming increasingly popular to facilitate data transfer in a variety of mobile applications. These APIs often process sensitive user information through their endpoints, which are…

It is undeniable that most developers today are building distributed applications. However, most of these applications are developed by composing existing systems together through unspecified APIs exposed to the application developer.…

Rebuilding packages from open source is a common practice to improve the security of software supply chains, and is now done at an industrial scale. The basic principle is to acquire the source code used to build a package published in a…

In the past decade, research on test-suite-based automatic program repair has grown significantly. Each year, new approaches and implementations are featured in major software engineering venues. However, most of those approaches are…

The 2019 edition of Stack Overflow developer survey highlights that, for the first time, Python outperformed Java in terms of popularity. The gap between Python and Java further widened in the 2020 edition of the survey. Unfortunately,…

Code readability and software complexity are important software quality metrics that impact other software metrics such as maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability. This paper presents an empirical study of the…

Library migration happens when a library can not meet the project's requirements and is non-trivial to accomplish. To mitigate the problem, substantial efforts have been devoted to understanding its characteristics and recommending…

The increasing popularity of JavaScript has led to a variety of JavaScript frameworks that aim to help developers to address programming tasks. However, the number of JavaScript frameworks has risen rapidly to thousands of versions. It is…

Is the quality of existing code correlated with the quality of subsequent changes? According to the (controversial) broken windows theory, which inspired this study, disorder sets descriptive norms and signals behavior that further…

With generative AI becoming widespread, the existence of AI-based programming assistants for developers is no surprise. Developers increasingly use them for their work, including generating code to fulfil the data protection requirements…

Context: Writing Clean Code understandable by other collaborators has become crucial to enhancing collaboration and productivity. However, very little is known regarding whether developers agree with Clean Code Principles and how they apply…