Related papers: Pull Request Decision Explained: An Empirical Over…
As a maintainer of an open source software project, you are usually happy about contributions in the form of pull requests that bring the project a step forward. Past studies have shown that when reviewing a pull request, not only its…
The maintenance and evolution of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects demand the constant attraction of core developers. In this paper, we report the results of a survey with 52 developers, who recently became core contributors…
The fact that the number of users of open source software (OSS) is practically un-limited and that ultimately the software quality is determined by end users experience, makes the usability an even more critical quality attribute than it is…
The pull-based development is widely adopted in modern open-source software (OSS) projects, where developers propose changes to the codebase by submitting a pull request (PR). However, due to many reasons, PRs in OSS projects frequently…
Background: Evolution of open source projects frequently depends on a small number of core developers. The loss of such core developers might be detrimental for projects and even threaten their entire continuation. However, it is possible…
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…
Context: The ``wontfix'' label is a widely used yet narrowly understood tool in GitHub repositories, indicating that an issue will not be pursued further. Despite its prevalence, the impact of this label on project management and community…
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has introduced a new set of tools to support software developers in solving pro- gramming tasks. However, our understanding of the interactions (i.e., prompts) between…
With the popularity of software ecosystems, the number of open source components (known as packages) has grown rapidly. Identifying high-quality and well-maintained packages from a large pool of packages to depend on is a basic and…
AI-agents help developers in different coding tasks, such as developing new features, fixing bugs, and reviewing code. Developers can write a Github issue and assign it to an AI-agent like Copilot for implementation. Based on the issue and…
GitHub's Copilot for Pull Requests (PRs) is a promising service aiming to automate various developer tasks related to PRs, such as generating summaries of changes or providing complete walkthroughs with links to the relevant code. As this…
Open source software development has become more social and collaborative, evident GitHub. Since 2016, GitHub started to support more informal methods such as emoji reactions, with the goal to reduce commenting noise when reviewing any code…
Background: Requirement engineering is often considered a critical activity in system development projects. The increasing complexity of software, as well as number and heterogeneity of stakeholders, motivate the development of methods and…
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…
Software evolves with changes to its codebase over time. Internally, software changes in response to decisions to include some code change into the codebase and discard others. Explaining the mechanism of software evolution, this paper…
Project based learning (PBL) for software development (we call it software development PBL) has garnered attention as a practical educational method. A number of studies have reported on the introduction of social coding tools such as…
Context: Addressing user requests in the form of bug reports and Github issues represents a crucial task of any successful software project. However, user-submitted issue reports tend to widely differ in their quality, and developers spend…
AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…
Trust is a factor that dramatically contributes to the success or failure of distributed software teams. We present a research model showing that social communication between distant developers enables the affective appraisal of…
Open source software projects evolve thanks to a group of volunteers that help in their development. Thus, the success of these projects depends on their ability to attract (and keep) developers. We believe the openness of a project, i.e.,…