Related papers: New developer metrics: Are comments as crucial as …
Usability is an increasing concern in open source software (OSS). Given the recent changes in the OSS landscape, it is imperative to examine the OSS contributors' current valued factors, practices, and challenges concerning usability. We…
Context. Source code refactoring is a well-established approach to improving source code quality without compromising its external behavior. Motivation. The literature described the benefits of refactoring, yet its application in practice…
Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…
The availability of open-source projects facilitates developers to contribute and collaborate on a wide range of projects. As a result, the developer community contributing to such open-source projects is also increasing. Many of the…
Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…
Proper incentives are important for motivating developers in open-source communities, which is crucial for maintaining the development of open-source software healthy. To provide such incentives, an accurate and objective developer…
Comments are very useful to the flow of code development. With the increasing commonality of code, novice coders have been creating a significant amount of codebases. Due to lack of commenting standards, their comments are often useless,…
As collaborative coding environments make it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these projects keeps increasing. This increase makes it more difficult for code reviewers to deal with buggy…
A fundamental unit of work in programming is the code contribution ("commit") that a developer makes to the code base of the project in work. We use statistical methods to derive a model of the probabilistic distribution of commit sizes in…
Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While…
GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…
Many software developers rely on open source software for developing their applications and writing their source codes. Measuring an independent project's overall productivity is still an open problem for many technology companies. In this…
Well structured and readable source code is a pre-requisite for maintainable software and successful collaboration among developers. Static analysis enables the automated extraction of code complexity and readability metrics which can be…
Although peer code review is widely adopted in both commercial and open source development, existing studies suggest that such code reviews often contain a significant amount of non-useful review comments. Unfortunately, to date, no tools…
Product innovation assessment in software sector is a timely topic. Nevertheless, research on that subject is particularly scant. As a result, there is a lack of criteria to measure software innovativeness. In a context of theoretical and…
Perhaps the most widely used form of code documentation is function header comments. We performed a large-scale survey of 367 developers to catalog their expectations from such documentation and to chronicle actual practice. Paradoxically,…
Prior literature has suggested that in many projects 80\% or more of the contributions are made by a small called group of around 20% of the development team. Most prior studies deprecate a reliance on such a small inner group of "heroes",…
Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…
Code comments are important for developers in program comprehension. In scenarios of comprehending and reusing a method, developers expect code comments to provide supplementary information beyond the method signature. However, the extent…
A software project has "Hero Developers" when 80% of contributions are delivered by 20% of the developers. Are such heroes a good idea? Are too many heroes bad for software quality? Is it better to have more/less heroes for different kinds…