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The automatic generation of pull requests (PRs) using AI agents has become increasingly common. Although AI-generated PRs are fast and easy to create, their merge rates have been reported to be lower than those created by humans. In this…
Hosting over 10 million of software projects, GitHub is one of the most important data sources to study behavior of developers and software projects. However, with the increase of the size of open source datasets, the potential threats to…
Quantum computing is rapidly advancing, but quantum software development faces significant challenges, including a steep learning curve, high hardware error rates, and a lack of mature engineering practices. This study conducts a…
Effective debugging is a crucial aspect of software development, demanding problem-solving skills, expertise, and appropriate tools. Although previous research has studied expert developers' debugging strategies, the specific factors…
Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…
Selecting third-party software packages in open-source ecosystems like Python is challenging due to the large number of alternatives and limited transparent evidence for comparison. Generative AI tools are increasingly used in development…
Background: Open source requires participation of volunteer and commercial developers (users) in order to deliver functional high-quality components. Developers both contribute effort in the form of patches and demand effort from the…
Understanding the reasons behind past code changes is critical for many software engineering tasks, including refactoring and reviewing code, diagnosing bugs, and implementing new features. Unfortunately, locating and reconstructing this…
Requirements Engineering in open source projects such as Eclipse faces the challenge of having to prioritize requirements for individual contributors in a more or less unobtrusive fashion. In contrast to conventional industrial software…
Software development, despite all the significant improvements it contributes to society, is a very expensive high-risk venture. Every software project commences with the intention to deliver a software product on time and within budget,…
GitHub's issue reports provide developers with valuable information that is essential to the evolution of a software development project. Contributors can use these reports to perform software engineering tasks like submitting bugs,…
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…
The open source development model has become a paradigm shift from traditional in-house/closed-source software development model, with many successes. Traditionally, open source projects were characterized essentially by their individual…
Peer code review locates common coding standard violations and simple logical errors in the early phases of software development, and thus, reduces overall cost. Unfortunately, at GitHub, identifying an appropriate code reviewer for a pull…
In the first half of 2025, coding agents have emerged as a category of development tools that have very quickly transitioned to the practice. Unlike ''traditional'' code completion LLMs such as Copilot, agents like Cursor, Claude Code, or…
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice that builds and tests software frequently (e.g., at every push). One main motivator to adopt CI is the potential to deliver software functionalities more quickly than not using…
The most popular code review tools (e.g., Gerrit and GitHub) present the files to review sorted in alphabetical order. Could this choice or, more generally, the relative position in which a file is presented bias the outcome of code…
Enabled by the pull-based development model, developers can easily contribute to a project through pull requests (PRs). When creating a PR, developers can add a free-form description to describe what changes are made in this PR and/or why.…
In a wave of growth, open-source projects need to modernize and change how they deal with processes, methods, and communication with their contributors. We could observe that open-source projects are constantly evolving to improve their…
Developers often struggle with maintaining GitHub Actions workflow configurations in GitHub-hosted repositories, with recent studies showing frequent execution failures. This paper empirically explores how the adoption and evolution of…