Related papers: Technical Leverage in a Software Ecosystem: Develo…

Context: When software is released publicly, it is common to include with it either the full text of the license or licenses under which it is published, or a detailed reference to them. Therefore public licenses, including FOSS (free, open…

In modern software development workflows, the open-source software supply chain contributes significantly to efficient and convenient engineering practices. With increasing system complexity, using open-source software as third-party…

The democratization of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) allows users to fine-tune and deploy models on local infrastructure but exposes them to a First Mile deployment landscape. Unlike black-box API consumption, the reliability of…

Background. Test resources are usually limited and therefore it is often not possible to completely test an application before a release. To cope with the problem of scarce resources, development teams can apply defect prediction to…

Providing high quality software and evaluating the software reliability in softwarized networks are crucial for vendors and customers. These networks rely on open source code, which are sensitive to contain high number of bugs. Both, the…

Today's software is bloated with both code and features that are not used by most users. This bloat is prevalent across the entire software stack, from operating systems and applications to containers. Containers are lightweight…

Open-source software (OSS) supply chain security has become a topic of concern for organizations. Patching an OSS vulnerability can require updating other dependent software products in addition to the original package. However, the…

Large language model agents increasingly rely on skill libraries for multi-step tasks, yet these libraries can accumulate persistent defects as skills are added, reused, patched, and linked to changing dependencies. We call this failure…

In the ever-shifting landscape of software engineering, we recognize the need for adaptation and evolution to maintain system dependability. As each software iteration potentially introduces new challenges, from unforeseen bugs to…

Software vulnerabilities are major risks to software systems. Recently, researchers have proposed many deep learning approaches to detect software vulnerabilities. However, their accuracy is limited in practice. One of the main causes is…

The utilization of third-party open-source libraries is widespread in modern software development. Due to the dependency relationships, vulnerabilities within open-source libraries pose significant security threats to downstream software.…

As financial institutions increasingly rely on machine learning models to automate lending decisions, concerns about algorithmic fairness have risen. This paper explores the tradeoff between enforcing fairness constraints (such as…

While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a…

Context: Technical debt (TD) refers to the additional costs incurred due to compromises in software quality, providing short-term advantages during development but potentially compromising long-term quality. Accurate TD forecasting and…

In the past two decades, several Machine Learning (ML) libraries have become freely available. Many studies have used such libraries to carry out empirical investigations on predictive Software Engineering (SE) tasks. However, the…

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…

We analyze software reuse from the perspective of information theory and Kolmogorov complexity, assessing our ability to ``compress'' programs by expressing them in terms of software components reused from libraries. A common theme in the…

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without…

As society becomes increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, the need to mitigate risk and harm is paramount. In response, researchers and practitioners have developed tools to detect and reduce undesired bias, commonly referred to…

As modern software development increasingly relies on reusable libraries and components, managing dependencies has become critical for ensuring software stability and security. However, challenges such as outdated dependencies, missed…