Related papers: An Exploratory Study of Project Activity Changepoi…
The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping software development as developers integrate these LLMs into their applications. In such applications, prompts serve as the primary means of interacting with LLMs. Despite the…
Modern systems operate in multiple contexts making variability a fundamental aspect of Configurable Software Systems (CSSs). Variability, implemented via pre-processor directives (e.g., #ifdef blocks) interleaved with other code and spread…
From science to industry, teamwork plays a crucial role in knowledge production and innovation. Most studies consider teams as static groups of individuals, thereby failing to capture how the micro-dynamics of collaborative processes and…
The cost of software maintenance often surpasses the initial development expenses, making it a significant concern for the software industry. A key strategy for alleviating future maintenance burdens is the early prediction and…
Background: Understanding maintenance activities performed in a source code repository could help practitioners reduce uncertainty and improve cost-effectiveness by planning ahead and pre-allocating resources towards source code…
Change point detection is an important part of time series analysis, as the presence of a change point indicates an abrupt and significant change in the data generating process. While many algorithms for change point detection have been…
Modifications to open-source software (OSS) are often provided in the form of "patch stacks" - sets of changes (patches) that modify a given body of source code. Maintaining patch stacks over extended periods of time is problematic when the…
Modern software systems rely on dependency networks of reusable libraries, where breaking changes propagate and cause downstream consumers to fail. Despite growing research across ecosystems, no comprehensive synthesis exists. We conduct a…
Just because software developers say they believe in "X", that does not necessarily mean that "X" is true. As shown here, there exist numerous beliefs listed in the recent Software Engineering literature which are only supported by small…
Easy and mostly free access to the internet has resulted in the growing use of open source software (OSS). However, it is a common perception that closed proprietary software is still superior in areas such as software maintenance and…
JavaScript (JS) is one of the most popular programming languages due to its flexibility and versatility, but maintaining JS code is tedious and error-prone. In our research, we conducted an empirical study to characterize the relationship…
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…
In open-source projects, anyone can contribute, so it is important to have an active continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in addition to a protocol for reporting security concerns, especially in projects that are…
Open-source code development has become widespread in recent years. As a result, open-source software platforms have also become popular, and millions of developers from diverse locations are able to contribute to the same projects. On…
Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before.…
With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…
During code reviews, an essential step in software quality assurance, reviewers have the difficult task of understanding and evaluating code changes to validate their quality and prevent introducing faults to the codebase. This is a tedious…
This study examines the impact of GitHub Copilot on a large sample of Copilot users (n=934,533). The analysis shows that users on average accept nearly 30% of the suggested code, leading to increased productivity. Furthermore, our research…
Automated static analysis tools (ASATs) have become a major part of the software development workflow. Acting on the generated warnings, i.e., changing the code indicated in the warning, should be part of, at latest, the code review phase.…
Open-source projects often rely on a small group of highly active contributors known as hero developers. Prior work shows that hero developers are common in many OSS and enterprise projects, yet who qualifies as a hero depends heavily on…