Related papers: U Owns the Code That Changes and How Marginal Owne…

Because open source software relies on individuals who select their own tasks, it is often underproduced -- a term used by software engineering researchers to describe when a piece of software's relative quality is lower than its relative…

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…

Although software managers are generally good at new project estimation, their experience of scheduling rework tends to be poor. Inconsistent or incorrect effort estimation can increase the risk that the completion time for a project will…

Context: Changing a software application with many build-time configuration settings may introduce unexpected side-effects. For example, a change intended to be specific to a platform (e.g., Windows) or product configuration (e.g.,…

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…

In software development, the identification of source code file experts is an important task. Identifying these experts helps to improve software maintenance and evolution activities, such as developing new features, code reviews, and bug…

Agile software development relies on self-organized teams, underlining the importance of individual responsibility. How developers take responsibility and build ownership are influenced by external factors such as architecture and…

This paper studies the problem of predicting the coding effort for a subsequent year of development by analysing metrics extracted from project repositories, with an emphasis on projects containing XML code. The study considers thirteen…

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of…

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…

Software source code often harbours "hotspots": small portions of the code that change far more often than the rest of the project and thus concentrate maintenance activity. We mine the complete version histories of 91 evolving, actively…

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…

Software product lines have recently been presented as one of the best promising improvements for the efficient software development. Different research works contribute supportive parameters and negotiations regarding the problems of…

The cost of software maintenance often surpasses the initial development expenses, making it a significant concern for the software industry. A key strategy for alleviating future maintenance burdens is the early prediction and…

Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…

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…

Source code is changed for a reason, e.g., to adapt, correct, or adapt it. This reason can provide valuable insight into the development process but is rarely explicitly documented when the change is committed to a source code repository.…

The speed at which code changes are integrated into the software codebase, also referred to as code review velocity, is a prevalent industry metric for improved throughput and developer satisfaction. While prior studies have explored…

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…