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The Open Source Software movement has been growing exponentially for a number of years with no signs of slowing. Driving this growth is the widespread availability of libraries and frameworks that provide many functionalities. Developers…
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.…
Decision-making is a key software engineering skill. Developers constantly make choices throughout the software development process, from requirements to implementation. While prior work has studied developer decision-making, the choices…
Scientists are frequently faced with the important decision to start or terminate a creative partnership. This process can be influenced by strategic motivations, as early career researchers are pursuers, whereas senior researchers are…
Many researchers assume that, for software analytics, "more data is better." We write to show that, at least for learning defect predictors, this may not be true. To demonstrate this, we analyzed hundreds of popular GitHub projects. These…
The security of research software is essential for ensuring the integrity and reproducibility of scientific results. However, research software security is still largely unexplored. Due to its dependence on open source components and…
Research software plays a crucial role in advancing scientific knowledge, but ensuring its sustainability, maintainability, and long-term viability is an ongoing challenge. To address these concerns, the Sustainable Research Software…
Collaborative scientific authoring is increasingly being supported by software tools. Traditionally, desktop-based authoring tools had the most advanced editing features, allowed for more formatting options, and included more import/export…
Background: Research software is crucial for enabling research discoveries and supporting data analysis, simulation, and interpretation across domains. However, evolving requirements, complex inputs, and legacy dependencies hinder the…
Context: Software engineering researchers and practitioners rely on empirical evidence from the field. Thus, education of software engineers must include strong and applied education in empirical research methods. For most students, the…
Context: Prior research has established that a few individuals generally dominate project communication and source code changes during software development, regardless of task assignments at project initiation. Objective: While this…
The design of software development tools follows from what the developers of such tools believe is true about software development. A key aspect of such beliefs is the size of code contributions (commits) to a software project. In this…
One of the main challenges that developers face when testing their systems lies in engineering test cases that are good enough to reveal bugs. And while our body of knowledge on software testing and automated test case generation is already…
Several open source software (OSS) projects expect to foster newcomers' onboarding and to receive contributions by participating in engagement programs, like Summers of Code. However, there is little empirical evidence showing why students…
The way developers collaborate inside and particularly across teams often escapes management's attention, despite a formal organization with designated teams being defined. Observability of the actual, organically formed engineering…
The modern engineering landscape increasingly requires a range of skills to successfully integrate complex systems. Project-based learning is used to help students build professional skills. However, it is typically applied to small teams…
Authorship of scientific articles has profoundly changed from early science until now. While once upon a time a paper was authored by a handful of authors, scientific collaborations are much more prominent on average nowadays. As authorship…
[Context] In software engineering research, emphasis is given to sound evaluations of new approaches. While industry surveys or industrial case studies are preferred to evaluate industrial applicability, controlled experiments with student…
This article describes the motivation, design, and progress of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). JOSS is a free and open-access journal that publishes articles describing research software. It has the dual goals of improving the…
Motivated and competent team members are a vital part of Agile Software development and make or break any project's success. Motivation is fostered by continuous progress and recognition of efforts. These concepts are founding pillars of…