Related papers: Power laws in code repositories: A skeptical appro…
Research software is increasingly recognized as a vital component of the scholarly record. Journals offer authors the opportunity to publish research software papers, but often have different requirements for how these publications should…
We review briefly the concepts underlying complex systems and probability distributions. The later are often taken as the first quantitative characteristics of complex systems, allowing one to detect the possible occurrence of regularities…
Faced with over 100M open source projects most empirical investigations select a subset. Most research papers in leading venues investigated filtering projects by some measure of popularity with explicit or implicit arguments that unpopular…
Background: Data mining and analyzing of public Git software repositories is a growing research field. The tools used for studies that investigate a single project or a group of projects have been refined, but it is not clear whether the…
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…
The code base of software projects evolves essentially through inserting and removing information to and from the source code. We can measure this evolution via the elements of information - tokens, words, nodes - of the respective…
Context: Motivation is known to improve performance. In software development in particular, there has been considerable interest in the motivation of contributors to open source. Objective: We identify 11 motivators from the literature…
Modern software development is based on a series of rapid incremental changes collaboratively made to large source code repositories by developers with varying experience and expertise levels. The ZeroIn project is aimed at analyzing the…
The Conservation of Energy plays a pivotal part in the development of the physical sciences. With the growth of computation and the study of other discrete token based systems such as the genome, it is useful to ask if there are…
Software evolves with changes to its codebase over time. Internally, software changes in response to decisions to include some code change into the codebase and discard others. Explaining the mechanism of software evolution, this paper…
This paper investigates the problem of coordinating several agents through their actions. Although the methodology applies to general scenarios, the present work focuses on a situation with an asymmetric observation structure that only…
The nature and complexity of software have changed significantly in the last few decades. With the easy availability of computing power, deeper and broader applications are made. It has been extremely necessary to produce good quality…
How should software engineering be adapted for Computational Science (CS)? If we understood that, then we could better support software sustainability, verifiability, reproducibility, comprehension, and usability for CS community. For…
Context: Mining software repositories is a popular means to gain insights into a software project's evolution, monitor project health, support decisions and derive best practices. Tools supporting the mining process are commonly applied by…
Coding agents have received significant adoption in software development recently. Unlike traditional LLM-based code completion tools, coding agents work with autonomy (e.g., invoking external tools) and leave visible traces in software…
The design of software development tools follows from what the developers of such tools believe is true about software development. A key aspect of such beliefs is the size of code contributions (commits) to a software project. In this…
When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…
Models of how things spread often assume that transmission mechanisms are fixed over time. However, social contagions--the spread of ideas, beliefs, innovations--can lose or gain in momentum as they spread: ideas can get reinforced, beliefs…
Open source software development, particularly within institutions such as universities and research laboratories, is often decentralized and difficult to track. Although academic teams produce many impactful scientific tools, their…
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…