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For more than thirty years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people. The underlying assumption seems to be that "happy and satisfied software developers perform…

One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…

Software development organisations aim to stay effective and efficient amid growing system complexity. To address this, they often form small teams focused on separate components that can be independently developed, tested, and deployed.…

In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…

From science to industry, teamwork plays a crucial role in knowledge production and innovation. Most studies consider teams as static groups of individuals, thereby failing to capture how the micro-dynamics of collaborative processes and…

For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been…

We present a code quality metric, Corrective Commit Probability (CCP), measuring the probability that a commit reflects corrective maintenance. We show that this metric agrees with developers' concept of quality, informative, and stable.…

Code review is a critical software engineering practice where developers review code changes before integration to ensure code quality, detect defects, and improve maintainability. In recent years, AI agents that can understand code…

The success of open source projects crucially depends on the voluntary contributions of a sufficiently large community of users. Apart from the mere size of the community, interesting questions arise when looking at the evolution of…

We report on a large-scale empirical study investigating the relevance of socio-technical congruence over key basic software quality metrics, namely, bugs and churn. In particular, we explore whether alignment or misalignment of social…

A fundamental unit of work in programming is the code contribution ("commit") that a developer makes to the code base of the project in work. We use statistical methods to derive a model of the probabilistic distribution of commit sizes in…

High-quality software products rely on both well-written source code and timely detection and thorough reporting of bugs. However, some programmers view bug reports as negative assessments of their work, leading them to withhold reporting…

Contributors to open source software packages often describe feeling discouraged by the lack of positive feedback from users. This paper describes a technology probe, Hug Reports, that provides users a communication affordance within their…

In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 500K comments from open-source repositories of software systems. Our aim is to empirically determine how developers interact with each other under certain psychological conditions generated…

The open source development model has become a paradigm shift from traditional in-house/closed-source software development model, with many successes. Traditionally, open source projects were characterized essentially by their individual…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…

Just because software developers say they believe in "X", that does not necessarily mean that "X" is true. As shown here, there exist numerous beliefs listed in the recent Software Engineering literature which are only supported by small…

Increasing code velocity is a common goal for a variety of software projects. The efficiency of the code review process significantly impacts how fast the code gets merged into the final product and reaches the customers. We conducted a…

Code velocity, or the speed with which code changes are integrated into a production environment, plays a crucial role in Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. Many studies report factors influencing code velocity. However,…

Although peer code review is widely adopted in both commercial and open source development, existing studies suggest that such code reviews often contain a significant amount of non-useful review comments. Unfortunately, to date, no tools…