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Software and systems traceability is widely accepted as an essential element for supporting many software development tasks. Today's version control systems provide inbuilt features that allow developers to tag each commit with one or more…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-04-10 Michael Rath , Jacob Rendall , Jin L. C. Guo , Jane Cleland-Huang , Patrick Maeder

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Addi Malviya Thakur , Reed Milewicz , Mahmoud Jahanshahi , Lavínia Paganini , Bogdan Vasilescu , Audris Mockus

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Debasish Chakroborti , Kevin A. Schneider , Chanchal K. Roy

Code maintenance data sets typically consist of a before and after version of the code that contains the improvement or fix. Such data sets are important for software engineering support tools related to code maintenance, such as program…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-27 Henry Tang , Sarah Nadi

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Mahmoud Jahanshahi , David Reid , Audris Mockus

Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source…

Web developers routinely rely on third-party Java-Script libraries such as jQuery to enhance the functionality of their sites. However, if not properly maintained, such dependencies can create attack vectors allowing a site to be…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Tobias Lauinger , Abdelberi Chaabane , Sajjad Arshad , William Robertson , Christo Wilson , Engin Kirda

Traceability between published scientific breakthroughs and their implementation is essential, especially in the case of open-source scientific software which implements bleeding-edge science in its code. However, aligning the link between…

Software libraries are the elementary building blocks of open source software ecosystems, extending the capabilities of programming languages beyond their standard libraries. Although ecosystem health is often quantified using data on…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Gábor Mészáros , Johannes Wachs

We are trying to find source code comments that help programmers understand a nontrivial part of source code. One of such examples would be explaining to assign a zero as a way to "clear" a buffer. Such comments are invaluable to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Yusuke Shinyama , Yoshitaka Arahori , Katsuhiko Gondow

Modern open source software development heavily relies on the issue tracking systems to manage their feature requests, bug reports, tasks, and other similar artifacts. Together, those "issues" form a complex network with links to each…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-11 Alexander Nicholson , Jin L. C. Guo

Comments are an integral part of software development; they are natural language descriptions associated with source code elements. Understanding explicit associations can be useful in improving code comprehensibility and maintaining the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Sheena Panthaplackel , Milos Gligoric , Raymond J. Mooney , Junyi Jessy Li

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…

Digital Libraries · Computer Science 2025-05-22 David Calano , Michele C. Weigle , Michael L. Nelson

Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Hideaki Hata , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Takashi Ishio , Christoph Treude

There are often multiple ways to implement the same requirement in source code. Different implementation choices can result in code snippets that are similar, and have been defined in multiple ways: code clones, examples, simions and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Venkatesh Vinayakarao , Devika Sondhi , Sumit Keswani , Rahul Purandare , Anita Sarma

Modern software development frequently uses third-party packages, raising the concern of supply chain security attacks. Many attackers target popular package managers, like npm, and their users with supply chain attacks. In 2021 there was a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Nusrat Zahan , Thomas Zimmermann , Patrice Godefroid , Brendan Murphy , Chandra Maddila , Laurie Williams

Language constructs inspired by functional programming have made their way into most mainstream programming languages. Many researchers and developers consider that these constructs lead to programs that are more concise, reusable, and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Fernando Alves , Delano Oliveira , Fernanda Madeiral , Fernando Castor

On Stack Overflow, users reuse 11,926,354 external links to share the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow website. The external links connect to the existing programming-related knowledge and extend the crowdsourced knowledge on…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Jiakun Liu , Haoxiang Zhang , Xin Xia , David Lo , Ying Zou , Ahmed E. Hassan , Shanping Li

As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-07-31 Xiaotao Song , Hailong Sun , Xu Wang , Jiafei Yan

In recent years, the explosion of malware and extensive code reuse have formed complex evolutionary connections among malware specimens. The rapid pace of development makes it challenging for existing studies to characterize recent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Bojing Li , Duo Zhong , Dharani Nadendla , Gabriel Terceros , Prajna Bhandar , Raguvir S , Charles Nicholas