Related papers: Power laws in code repositories: A skeptical appro…
The disorder and a simple convex measure of complexity are studied for rank ordered power law distributions, indicative of criticality, in the case where the total number of ranks is large. It is found that a power law distribution may…
The Open Source Software movement has been growing exponentially for a number of years with no signs of slowing. Driving this growth is the widespread availability of libraries and frameworks that provide many functionalities. Developers…
Software repositories are an essential source of information for software engineering research on topics such as project evolution and developer collaboration. Appropriate mining tools and analysis pipelines are therefore an indispensable…
If managers assume a normal or near-normal distribution of Information Technology (IT) project cost overruns, as is common, and cost overruns can be shown to follow a power-law distribution, managers may be unwittingly exposing their…
Software security has been an important research topic over the years. The community has proposed processes and tools for secure software development and security analysis. However, a significant number of vulnerabilities remains in…
Power laws are a characteristic distribution that are ubiquitous, in that they are found almost everywhere, in both natural as well as in man-made systems. They tend to emerge in large, connected and self-organizing systems, for example,…
Modeling distributions of citations to scientific papers is crucial for understanding how science develops. However, there is a considerable empirical controversy on which statistical model fits the citation distributions best. This paper…
Power law distributions have been found in many natural and social phenomena, and more recently in the source code and run-time characteristics of Object-Oriented (OO) systems. A power law implies that small values are extremely common,…
GitHub is the largest code hosting platform, with millions of repositories spanning multiple technologies. Despite this, little is known about the actual contents of GitHub's repositories in the wild. This paper presents an initial…
The question how complex systems become more organized and efficient with time is open. Examples are, the formation of elementary particles from pure energy, the formation of atoms from particles, the formation of stars and galaxies, the…
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…
Machine programming (MP) is an emerging field at the intersection of deterministic and probabilistic computing, and it aims to assist software and hardware engineers, among other applications. Along with powerful compute resources, MP…
We study how open source communities describe participation and control through version controlled governance documents. Using a corpus of 710 projects with paired snapshots, we parse text into actors, rules, actions, and objects, then…
Over the last decades, impressive progresses have been made in many experimental domains, e.g. microscopic techniques such as single-particle tracking, leading to plethoric amounts of data. In a large variety of systems, from natural to…
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…
In this study we are testing whether the power law slopes ($\alpha_F$, $\alpha_E$) of fluxes $(F)$, fluences or energies $(E)$ are universal in their size distributions, $N(F) \propto F^{-\alpha_F}$ and $N(E) \propto E^{-\alpha_E}$, in…
Version control systems for source code, such as Git, are key tools in modern software development environments. Many developers use online services, such as GitHub or GitLab, for collaborative software development. While software projects…
Software evolution is a fundamental process that transcends the realm of technical artifacts and permeates the entire organizational structure of a software project. By means of a longitudinal empirical study of 18 large open-source…
Millions of developers share their code on open-source platforms like GitHub, which offer social coding opportunities such as distributed collaboration and popularity-based ranking. Software engineering researchers have joined in as well,…
One of the first steps to understand and forecast economic downturns is identifying their frequency distribution, but it remains uncertain. This problem is common in phenomena displaying power-law-like distributions. Power laws play a…