Related papers: Power laws in code repositories: A skeptical appro…
The United States Code (Code) is an important source of Federal law that is produced by the interactions of many heterogeneous actors in a complex, dynamic space. The Code can be represented as the union of a hierarchical network and a…
Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While…
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,…
We study a few dynamical systems composed of many components whose sizes evolve according to multiplicative stochastic rules. We compare them with respect to the emergence of power laws in the size distribution of their components. We show…
Energy efficiency has become a growing concern in software development, leading to the need for tools designed to measure energy consumption. While several energy measurement tools are available as open-source projects, their…
Version Control Systems (VCS) like Git allow developers to locally rewrite recorded history, e.g., to reorder and suppress commits or specific data in them. These alterations have legitimate use cases, but become problematic when performed…
AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…
Over the last few decades power law distributions have been suggested as forming generative mechanisms in a variety of disparate fields, such as, astrophysics, criminology and database curation. However, fitting these heavy tailed…
Power laws and distributions with heavy tails are common features of many experimentally studied complex systems, like the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and solar flares, or the duration of neuronal avalanches in the brain.…
Power law distributions of macroscopic observables are ubiquitous in both the natural and social sciences. They are indicative of correlated, cooperative phenomena between groups of interacting agents at the microscopic level. In this paper…
More than one billion data sampled with different frequencies from several financial instruments were investigated with the aim of testing whether they involve power law. As a result, a known power law with the power exponent around -4 was…
Following code style conventions in software projects is essential for maintaining overall code quality. Adhering to these conventions improves maintainability, understandability, and extensibility. Additionally, following best practices…
To explore the prevalence of abrupt changes (changepoints) in open source project activity, we assembled a dataset of 8,919 projects from the World of Code. Projects were selected based on age, number of commits, and number of authors.…
In recent years, defect prediction has received a great deal of attention in the empirical software engineering world. Predicting software defects before the maintenance phase is very important not only to decrease the maintenance costs but…
Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…
Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…
Code clones are code snippets that are identical or similar to other snippets within the same or different files. They are often created through copy-and-paste practices and modified during development and maintenance activities. Since a…
Well structured and readable source code is a pre-requisite for maintainable software and successful collaboration among developers. Static analysis enables the automated extraction of code complexity and readability metrics which can be…
Many different citation-based indicators are used by researchers and research evaluators to help evaluate the impact of scholarly outputs. Although the appropriateness of individual citation indicators depends in part on the statistical…
Dynamic code, i.e., code that is created or modified at runtime, is ubiquitous in today's world. The behavior of dynamic code can depend on the logic of the dynamic code generator in subtle and non-obvious ways, with significant security…