Related papers: Power laws in code repositories: A skeptical appro…
Open-sourcing research publications is a key enabler for the reproducibility of studies and the collective scientific progress of a research community. As all fields of science develop more advanced algorithms, we become more dependent on…
One of the key clues to consider rainfall as a self-organized critical phenomenon is the existence of power-law distributions for rain-event sizes. We have studied the problem of universality in the exponents of these distributions by means…
Source code is changed for a reason, e.g., to adapt, correct, or adapt it. This reason can provide valuable insight into the development process but is rarely explicitly documented when the change is committed to a source code repository.…
Context: Software Engineering research makes use of collections of software artifacts (corpora) to derive empirical evidence from. Goal: To improve quality and reproducibility of research, we need to understand the characteristics of used…
Open digital public infrastructure needs community management to ensure accountability, sustainability, and robustness. Yet open-source projects often rely on centralized decision-making, and the determinants of successful community…
Observing and controlling complex networks are of paramount interest for understanding complex physical, biological and technological systems. Recent studies have made important advances in identifying sensor or driver nodes, through which…
Using libraries in applications has helped developers reduce the costs of reinventing already existing code. However, an increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch…
Open source software projects usually acknowledge contributions with text files, websites, and other idiosyncratic methods. These data sources are hard to mine, which is why contributorship is most frequently measured through changes to…
Large language models with a huge number of parameters, when trained on near internet-sized number of tokens, have been empirically shown to obey neural scaling laws: specifically, their performance behaves predictably as a power law in…
The power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…
As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…
Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code by changing its internal structure without affecting its external behaviour, with the main aims of improving the quality of software product. Therefore, there is a belief…
Software code quality is a construct with three dimensions: maintainability, reliability, and functionality. Although many firms have incorporated code quality metrics in their operations, evaluating these metrics still lacks consistent…
Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…
Software systems are increasingly making decisions on behalf of humans, raising concerns about the fairness of such decisions. Such concerns are usually attributed to flaws in algorithmic design or biased data, but we argue that they are…
Open and reproducible research in materials science relies on the availability of data, code, and common metadata standards. Journal research data policies (RDPs) remain a primary mechanism by which publication norms are defined and…
Open Source Software (OSS) communities often resist regulation typical of traditional organizations. Yet formal governance systems are being increasingly adopted among communities, particularly through non-profit mentor foundations. Our…
Existing methods for verifying access control policies require the policy to be complete and fully determined before verification can proceed, but in practice policies are developed iteratively, composed from independently maintained…
The reproducibility of academic research has long been a persistent issue, contradicting one of the fundamental principles of science. What is even more concerning is the increasing number of false claims found in academic manuscripts…
Git is used as the distributed version control system for many open-source software projects. One Git-based service, GitHub, is the most common code hosting and repository service for open-source software projects. For researchers that…