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More and more users and developers are using Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) to report issues, including bugs, feature requests, enhancement suggestions, etc. Different information, however, is gathered from users when issues are reported on…

Nearly every popular programming language comes with one or more package managers. The software packages distributed by such package managers form large software ecosystems. These packaging ecosystems contain a large number of package…

AI Agents have rapidly gained prominence in both research and industry as systems that extend large language models with planning, tool use, memory, and goal-directed action. Despite this progress, the development and maintenance of Agent…

New programming languages (e.g., Swift, Go, Rust, etc.) are being introduced to provide a better opportunity for the developers to make software development robust and easy. At the early stage, a programming language is likely to have…

Understanding the causes of software defects is essential for reliable software maintenance and ecosystem stability. However, existing bug datasets do not distinguish between issues originating within a project from those caused by external…

Data redundancy is ubiquitous in the inputs and intermediate results of Deep Neural Networks (DNN). It offers many significant opportunities for improving DNN performance and efficiency and has been explored in a large body of work. These…

Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is…

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…

Software misconfiguration has consistently been a major reason for software failures. Over the past two decades, much work has been done to detect and diagnose software misconfigurations. However, there is still a gap between real-world…

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…

In the context of modern software engineering, there is a trend towards Cloud-native software development involving international teams with members from all over the world. Cloud-based version management services like GitHub are commonly…

Agile software development is nowadays a widely adopted practise in both open-source and industrial software projects. Agile teams typically heavily rely on issue management tools to document new issues and keep track of outstanding ones,…

Many research groups aspire to make data and code FAIR and reproducible, yet struggle because the data and code life cycles are disconnected, executable environments are often missing from published work, and technical skill requirements…

Vulnerabilities in open source packages can be a security risk for the client projects that use these packages as dependencies. When a new vulnerability is discovered in a package, the package should quickly release a fix in a new version,…

Large language models that exhibit instruction-following behaviour represent one of the biggest recent upheavals in conversational interfaces, a trend in large part fuelled by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a proprietary large language…

As computer systems become more and more complex, software and tools lag more and more behind. This is especially true for scientific software that often demands high performance, and thus needs to take advantage of parallelisms, memory…

Software maintenance constitutes a large portion of the software development lifecycle. To carry out maintenance tasks, developers often need to understand and reproduce bug reports. As such, there has been increasing research activity…

README files play an important role in providing installation-related instructions to software users and are widely used in open source software systems on platforms such as GitHub. However, these files often suffer from various…

While often assumed a gold standard, effective human evaluation of text generation remains an important, open area for research. We revisit this problem with a focus on producing consistent evaluations that are reproducible -- over time and…

Context: Digital and physical trails of user activities are collected over the use of software applications and systems. As software becomes ubiquitous, protecting user privacy has become challenging. With the increase of user privacy…