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The two most significant bottlenecks in code merging are the build process and the unit tests. However, as the number of items to be checked in a code review increases, that code review becomes a bottleneck for code merging as well. Because…

We study how open source communities describe participation and control through version controlled governance documents. Using a corpus of 710 projects with paired snapshots, we parse text into actors, rules, actions, and objects, then…

Regression testing assures software correctness after changes but is resource-intensive. Test Case Prioritisation (TCP) mitigates this by ordering tests to maximise early fault detection. Diversity-based TCP prioritises dissimilar tests,…

General large language models (LLMs), represented by ChatGPT, have demonstrated significant potential in tasks such as code generation in software engineering. This has led to the development of specialized LLMs for software engineering,…

Linux kernel bug repair is typically approached as a direct mapping from crash reports to code patches. In practice, however, kernel fixes undergo iterative revision on mailing lists before acceptance, with reviewer feedback shaping…

LLM-based Triton kernel generation has attracted significant interest, yet a fundamental empirical question remains unanswered: where does this capability break down, and why? We present KernelBenchX, a benchmark designed to answer this…

Traditional algorithms for detecting differences in source code focus on differences between lines. As such, little can be learned about abstract changes that occur over time within a project. Structural differencing on the program's…

Code review is a critical practice in modern software engineering, helping developers detect defects early, improve code quality, and facilitate knowledge sharing. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), a growing body…

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Since the rise of neural natural-language-to-code models (NL->Code) that can generate long expressions and statements rather than a single next-token, one of the major problems has been reliably evaluating their generated output. In this…

Many small-scale software systems, that is, with limited codebase or binary size, are widely used in everyday tasks, yet their configurability remains largely unexplored. At the same time, studies on modern software systems show a trend…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

Understanding the collective social behavior of software developers is crucial to model and predict the long-term dynamics and sustainability of Open Source Software (OSS) communities. To this end, we analyze temporal activity patterns of…

When using LLMs to address Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), developers may behave differently (e.g., expressing the same NFR in different words). Robust LLMs should output consistent results across these variations; however, this aspect…

A fundamental unit of work in programming is the code contribution ("commit") that a developer makes to the code base of the project in work. An author's commit frequency describes how often that author commits. Knowing the distribution of…

The Linux kernel is mostly designed for multi-programed environments, but high-performance applications have other requirements. Such applications are run standalone, and usually rely on runtime systems to distribute the application's…

Software engineering is not an empirically based discipline. Consequently, many of its practices are based on little more than a generally agreed feeling that something may be true. Part of the problem is that it is both relatively young…

Peer code review has been found to be effective in identifying security vulnerabilities. However, despite practicing mandatory code reviews, many Open Source Software (OSS) projects still encounter a large number of post-release security…

In 2024, the Linux kernel became its own Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Numbering Authority (CNA), formalizing how kernel vulnerabilities are identified and tracked. We analyze the anatomy and dynamics of kernel CVEs using…

Understanding and effectively managing Technical Debt (TD) remains a vital challenge in software engineering. While many studies on code-level TD have been published, few illustrate the business impact of low-quality source code. In this…