Related papers: How Do Code Changes Evolve in Different Platforms?…

Many software projects implement APIs and algorithms in multiple programming languages. Maintaining such projects is tiresome, as developers have to ensure that any change (e.g., a bug fix or a new feature) is being propagated, timely and…

Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase,…

The amount of software running on mobile devices is constantly growing as consumers and industry purchase more battery powered devices. On the other hand, tools that provide developers with feed- back on how their software changes affect…

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.…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

The aim of this study is to evaluate the performance of AI-assisted programming in actual mobile development teams that are focused on native mobile languages like Kotlin and Swift. The extensive case study involves 16 participants and 2…

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…

Developing software with the source code open to the public is prevalent; however, similar to its closed counter part, open-source has quality problems, which cause functional failures, such as program breakdowns, and non-functional, such…

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,…

Software testing is an important phase in the software development life-cycle because it helps in identifying bugs in a software system before it is shipped into the hand of its end users. There are numerous studies on how developers test…

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.…

Many research areas in software engineering, such as mutation testing, automatic repair, fault localization, and fault injection, rely on empirical knowledge about recurring bug-fixing code changes. Previous studies in this field focus on…

With the widespread use and adoption of mobile platforms like Android a new software quality concern has emerged -- energy consumption. However, developing energy-efficient software and applications requires knowledge and likewise proper…

Software source code often harbours "hotspots": small portions of the code that change far more often than the rest of the project and thus concentrate maintenance activity. We mine the complete version histories of 91 evolving, actively…

The focus on rapid software delivery inevitably results in the accumulation of technical debt, which, in turn, affects quality and slows future development. Yet, companies with a long history of rapid delivery exist. Our primary aim is to…

Code comments are essential for clarifying code functionality, improving readability, and facilitating collaboration among developers. Despite their importance, comments often become outdated, leading to inconsistencies with the…

This paper investigates how the duration of various code review periods changes over a projects' lifetime. We study four open-source software (OSS) projects: Blender, FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla. We mine and analyze the characteristics of…

Many phone vendors use Android as their underlying OS, but often extend it to add new functionality and to make it compatible with their specific phones. When a new version of Android is released, phone vendors need to merge or re-apply…

Mobile applications have become a popular software development domain in recent years due in part to a large user base, capable hardware, and accessible platforms. However, mobile developers also face unique challenges, including pressure…

Detecting refactorings in commit history is essential to improve the comprehension of code changes in code reviews and to provide valuable information for empirical studies on software evolution. Several techniques have been proposed to…