English
Related papers

Related papers: Power laws in code repositories: A skeptical appro…

200 papers

Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Marco di Biase , Magiel Bruntink , Arie van Deursen , Alberto Bacchelli

Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-12-07 Vahid Garousi , Michael Felderer , Feyza Nur Kilicaslan

Geo-replicated systems provide a number of desirable properties such as globally low latency, high availability, scalability, and built-in fault tolerance. Unfortunately, programming correct applications on top of such systems has proven to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Kartik Nagar , Prasita Mukherjee , Suresh Jagannathan

Reports of poor work well-being and fluctuating productivity in software engineering have been reported in both academic and popular sources. Understanding and predicting these issues through repository analysis might help manage software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Miikka Kuutila , Mika Mäntylä , Maëlick , Claes , Marko Elovainio , Bram Adams

This poster describes work on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in open-source software. Although open-source software is commonly integrated into regulated software, and thus must be engineered or adapted for compliance, we do…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Lucas Franke , Huayu Liang , Aaron Brantly , James C Davis , Chris Brown

A recent claim has been made in the journal Nature that there must be a self-regulation in the waiting times to see hospital consultants on the ground that the relative changes in the size of waiting lists follow a power law. In agreement…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-07 D. Sornette

Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Christoph Matthies , Franziska Dobrigkeit , Guenter Hesse

The size distribution of planned and forced outages and following restoration times in power systems have been studied for almost two decades and has drawn great interest as they display heavy tails. Understanding of this phenomenon has…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-08-09 Bálint Hartmann , Shengfeng Deng , Géza Ódor , Jeffrey Kelling

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

We study the emergence of a power law distribution in the systems which can be characterized by a hierarchically organized supplying network. It is shown that conservation laws on the branches of the network can, at some approximation,…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2007-05-23 V. Gafiychuk , I. Lubashevsky , A. Stosyk

Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created - and maintained - synchronously. In this paper we investigate whether production code and the accompanying tests co-evolve by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2007-05-25 Andy Zaidman , Bart Van Rompaey , Serge Demeyer , Arie van Deursen

Hosting over 10 million of software projects, GitHub is one of the most important data sources to study behavior of developers and software projects. However, with the increase of the size of open source datasets, the potential threats to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-09 Can Cheng , Bing Li , Zengyang Li , Peng Liang

Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Kaveh Shahedi , Nana Gyambrah , Heng Li , Maxime Lamothe , Foutse Khomh

Large language model (LLM)-based coding agents achieve impressive results on controlled benchmarks yet routinely produce pull requests that real maintainers reject. The root cause is not functional incorrectness but a lack of organicity:…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Mo Li , L. H. Xu , Qitai Tan , Ting Cao , Yunxin Liu

Artificial Intelligence systems, which benefit from the availability of large-scale datasets and increasing computational power, have become effective solutions to various critical tasks, such as natural language understanding, speech…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Zhou Yang , Chenyu Wang , Jieke Shi , Thong Hoang , Pavneet Kochhar , Qinghua Lu , Zhenchang Xing , David Lo

Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Wen Siang Tan , Markus Wagner , Christoph Treude

Heavy-tailed or power-law distributions are becoming increasingly common in biological literature. A wide range of biological data has been fitted to distributions with heavy tails. Many of these studies use simple fitting methods to find…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2007-12-06 A. James , M. J. Plank

\textbf{Context:} Policy-as-Code (PaC) has become a foundational approach for embedding governance, compliance, and security requirements directly into software systems. While organizations increasingly adopt PaC tools, the software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Patrick Loic Foalem , Foutse Khomh , Leuson Da Silva , Ettore Merlo

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technique that guarantees the traceability of transactions. Blockchain is adopted in multiple domains like finance (e.g., cryptocurrency), healthcare, security, and supply chain. In the open-source…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-05-18 Ajoy Das , Gias Uddin , Guenther Ruhe

Most modern software products incorporate open-source components, requiring development teams to maintain compliance with each component's licenses. Noncompliance can have significant financial, legal, and reputational repercussions.…