Related papers: Power laws in code repositories: A skeptical appro…
Modern software systems rely on dependency networks of reusable libraries, where breaking changes propagate and cause downstream consumers to fail. Despite growing research across ecosystems, no comprehensive synthesis exists. We conduct a…
[Context] Accurate time estimation is a critical aspect of predictable software engineering. Previous work shows that low source code quality increases the uncertainty in issue resolution times. [Objective] Our goal is to evaluate how…
Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…
Many natural or human-made systems encompassing local reactions and diffusion processes exhibit spatially distributed patterns of some relevant dynamical variable. These interactions, through self-organization and critical phenomena, give…
Zipf's power-law distribution is a generic empirical statistical regularity found in many complex systems. However, rather than universality with a single power-law exponent (equal to 1 for Zipf's law), there are many reported deviations…
Open-source software is widely used in commercial applications. Pair that with the fact that when choosing open-source software for a new problem, developers often use social proof as a cue. These two facts raise concerns that bad actors…
Data from software repositories have become an important foundation for the empirical study of software engineering processes. A recurring theme in the repository mining literature is the inference of developer networks capturing e.g.…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
Software intensively depends on external libraries whose relevance may change during its life cycle. As a consequence, software developers must periodically reconsider the libraries they depend on, and must think about \textit{library…
Third-party library reuse has become common practice in contemporary software development, as it includes several benefits for developers. Library dependencies are constantly evolving, with newly added features and patches that fix bugs in…
Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query.…
Open source software ecosystems consist of thousands of interdependent libraries, which users can combine to great effect. Recent work has pointed out two kinds of risks in these systems: that technical problems like bugs and…
Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…
Although information theory has found success in disciplines, the literature on its applications to software evolution is limit. We are still missing artifacts that leverage the data and tooling available to measure how the information…
The use of free and open source software (OSS) is gaining momentum due to the ever increasing availability and use of the Internet. Organizations are also now adopting open source software, despite some reservations, in particular regarding…
The rise of large language models for code has reshaped software development. Autonomous coding agents, able to create branches, open pull requests, and perform code reviews, now actively contribute to real-world projects. Their growing…
Power law size distribution is found to associate with fractal, self-organized behaviors and patterns of complex systems. Such distribution also emerges from natural lakes, with potentially important links to the dynamics of lake systems.…
The management of data and digital assets poses various challenges, including the need to adhere to legal requirements with respect to personal data protection and copyright. Usage control technologies could be used by software platform…
Software developers often submit questions to technical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow (SO) to resolve code-level problems. In practice, they include example code snippets with questions to explain the programming issues. Existing research…
To understand and explain process behaviour we need to be able to see it, and decide its significance, i.e. be able to tell a story about its behaviours. This paper describes a few of the modelling challenges that underlie monitoring and…