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Managing issue reports is essential for the evolution and maintenance of software systems. However, manual issue management tasks such as triaging, prioritizing, localizing, and resolving issues are highly resource-intensive for projects…

Background: Widespread use of third-party libraries makes ecosystems like Node Package Manager (npm) critical to modern software development. However, this interconnected chain of dependencies also creates challenges: bugs in one library…

Re-using open-source software (OSS) can avoid reinventing the wheel, but failing to keep it up-to-date can lead to missing new features and persistent bugs or vulnerabilities that have already been resolved. The use of outdated OSS…

Real-world programs are neither monolithic nor static -- they are constructed using platform and third party libraries, and both programs and libraries continuously evolve in response to change pressure. In case of the Java language, rules…

As a mixed result of intensive dependency on third-party libraries, flexible mechanism to declare dependencies, and increased number of modules in a project, multiple versions of the same third-party library are directly depended in…

With the urgent need to secure supply chains among Open Source libraries, attention has focused on mitigating vulnerabilities detected in these libraries. Although awareness has improved recently, most studies still report delays in the…

Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…

Software bots connect users and tools, streamlining the pull request review process in social coding platforms. However, bots can introduce information overload into developers' communication. Information overload is especially problematic…

A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…

Code churn refers to the measure of the amount of code added, modified, or deleted in a project and is often used to assess codebase stability and maintainability. Program comprehension or how understandable the changes are, is equally…

Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such (semi-)automated programs, it is…

Automated GUI testing frameworks such as Cypress and Playwright rely on locators to find and interact with web elements. A locator break occurs when a structural change in the application under test causes a locator to no longer find its…

Due to the increasing number of attacks targeting open source library ecosystems, assisting maintainers has become a top priority. This is especially important since maintainers are usually overworked. Although the motivation of Open Source…

Code changes are performed differently in the mobile and non-mobile platforms. Prior work has investigated the differences in specific platforms. However, we still lack a deeper understanding of how code changes evolve across different…

One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…

Complex software systems have a network of dependencies. Developers often configure package managers (e.g., npm) to automatically update dependencies with each publication of new releases containing bug fixes and new features. When a…

Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…

Autonomous coding agents are reshaping software development by creating pull requests (PRs) on GitHub, referred to as agentic PRs. In parallel, the review process is also becoming autonomous, thereby making reviewer bots key actors in the…

In 2017, GitHub was the first online open source platform to show security alerts to its users. It has since introduced further security interventions to help developers improve the security of their open source software. In this study, we…

Software repositories contain a plethora of useful information that can be used to enhance software projects. Prior work has leveraged repository data to improve many aspects of the software development process, such as, help extract…