Related papers: An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues vi…
The open-source Linux operating system is available through a wide variety of distributions, each containing a collection of installable software packages. It can be important to keep these packages as fresh as possible to benefit from new…
Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…
Being able to automatically detect the performance issues in apps can significantly improve apps' quality as well as having a positive influence on user satisfaction. Application Performance Management (APM) libraries are used to locate the…
The increasing popularity of certain programming languages has spurred the creation of ecosystem-specific package repositories and package managers. Such repositories (e.g., npm, PyPI) serve as public databases that users can query to…
Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…
Modern software systems have transitioned from purely code-based architectures to AI-integrated systems where pre-trained models (PTMs) serve as permanent dependencies. However, while the evolution of traditional software libraries is…
Python is a popular, widely used, and general-purpose programming language. In spite of its ever-growing community, researchers have not performed much analysis on Python's topics, trends, and technologies which provides insights for…
Software vulnerabilities have a large negative impact on the software systems that we depend on daily. Reports on software vulnerabilities always paint a grim picture, with some reports showing that 83% of organizations depend on vulnerable…
Due to their increasing complexity, today's software systems are frequently built by leveraging reusable code in the form of libraries and packages. Software ecosystems (e.g., npm) are the primary enablers of this code reuse, providing…
Software deployment suffers from numerous problems pertaining, for example, to reproducibility and dependency resolution. Many of these problems have been successfully solved by the purely functional approach to package management…
With the advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), an increasing number of open-source software projects are using LLMs as their core functional component. Although research and practice on LLMs are capturing considerable interest, no…
An issue tracker is a software tool used by organisations to interact with users and manage various aspects of the software development lifecycle. With the rise of agile methodologies, issue trackers have become popular in open and…
User feedback is becoming an increasingly important source of information for requirements engineering, user interface design, and software engineering in general. Nowadays, user feedback is largely available and easily accessible in social…
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), represented by OpenAI's GPT series, has significantly impacted various domains such as natural language processing, software development, education, healthcare, finance, and scientific…
The upgrade problems faced by Free and Open Source Software distributions have characteristics not easily found elsewhere. We describe the structure of packages and their role in the upgrade process. We show that state of the art package…
While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a…
a) Context: In many programming language ecosystems, developers rely more and more on external open source dependencies, made available through package managers. Key ecosystem packages that go unmaintained create a health risk for the…
Recent high-profile incidents in open-source software have greatly raised practitioner attention on software supply chain attacks. To guard against potential malicious package updates, security practitioners advocate pinning dependency to…
As project managers (PMs) play an important role in project success, assigning PMs with appropriate skills and personalities to projects is a crucial task. Empirical research on skill requirements for information technology (IT) PMs is…
Reusing third-party software packages is a common practice in software development. As the scale and complexity of open-source software (OSS) projects continue to grow (e.g., Linux distributions), the number of reused third-party packages…