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Commit messages (CMs) are an essential part of version control. By providing important context in regard to what has changed and why, they strongly support software maintenance and evolution. But writing good CMs is difficult and often…

Typical evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) report a single metric per dataset, often representing the model's best-case performance under carefully selected settings. Unfortunately, this approach overlooks model robustness and…

Context: Technical Debt requirements are related to the distance between the ideal value of the specification and the system's actual implementation, which are consequences of strategic decisions for immediate gains, or unintended changes…

Software practitioners often encounter workplace unfairness, such as unequal recognition and gender bias. While the link between fairness and job satisfaction has been established in other fields, its relevance to software professionals…

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly become central to various applications and interact with diverse user populations, ensuring their reliable and consistent performance is becoming more important. This paper explores a critical…

Background: The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software development has opened new possibilities for code generation. Despite the widespread use of this technology, it remains unclear how well LLMs generate code solutions in terms…

In this paper, we ask the question of why the quality of commercial software, in terms of security and safety, does not measure up to that of other (durable) consumer goods we have come to expect. We examine this question through the lens…

Agile methods and associated practices have been held to deliver value to software developers and customers. Research studies have reported team productivity and software quality benefits. While such insights are helpful for understanding…

Due to their pivotal role in software engineering, considerable effort is spent on the quality assurance of software requirements specifications. As they are mainly described in natural language, relatively few means of automated quality…

Managing technical quality in agile Research and Development (R&D) software projects represents a persistent challenge, particularly in contexts characterized by high technical uncertainty and experimental pressure. This exploratory pilot…

Code review is a cornerstone of software quality assurance, and recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in its automation. However, existing benchmarks for LLM-based code review face three major limitations. Lack…

Large language models (LLMs) have become essential tools in software development, widely used for requirements engineering, code generation and review tasks. Software engineers often rely on LLMs to assess whether system code implementation…

Benchmarks shape scientific conclusions about model capabilities and steer model development. This creates a feedback loop: stronger benchmarks drive better models, and better models demand more discriminative benchmarks. Ensuring benchmark…

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping software development, but their impact across the software development lifecycle is underexplored. Existing work focuses on isolated activities such as code generation or testing, leaving…

Software is becoming a critical component of most products and organizational functions. The ability to continuously improve software determines how well the organization can respond to market opportunities. Continuous software engineering…

Researchers in empirical software engineering often make claims based on observable data such as defect reports. Unfortunately, in many cases, these claims are generalized beyond the data sets that have been evaluated. Will the researcher's…

Choice consistency with utility maximization, as a key assumption in economics, has been extensively used to evaluate decision quality of individuals and to predict real-world outcomes across different contexts. Here we investigate the…

Context: Software security patch management purports to support the process of patching known software security vulnerabilities. Given the increasing recognition of the importance of software security patch management, it is important and…

Because open source software relies on individuals who select their own tasks, it is often underproduced -- a term used by software engineering researchers to describe when a piece of software's relative quality is lower than its relative…

Feature toggles and configuration options are modern programmatic techniques to easily include or exclude functionality in a software product. The research contributions to these two techniques have most often been focused on either one of…