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The development process of scientific applications is largely dependent on scientific progress and the experimental research results. Thus, dealing with frequent changes is one of the main problems faced by the developers of scientific…

As modern software extensively uses free open source packages as dependencies, developers have to regularly pull in new third-party code through frequent updates. However, without a proper review of every incoming change, vulnerable and…

Labels on platforms such as GitHub support triage and coordination, yet little is known about how well they align with code modifications or how such alignment affects collaboration across contributor experience levels. We present a case…

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…

Motivated by applications of distributed storage systems to cloud-based key-value stores, the multi-version coding problem has been recently formulated to efficiently store frequently updated data in asynchronous decentralized storage…

Relying on dependency packages accelerates software development, but it also increases the exposure to security vulnerabilities that may be present in dependencies. While developers have full control over which dependency packages (and…

Applications depend on libraries to avoid reinventing the wheel. Libraries may have incompatible changes during evolving. As a result, applications will suffer from compatibility failures. There has been much research on addressing…

Docker has gained attention as a lightweight container-based virtualization platform. The process for building a Docker image is defined in a text file called a Dockerfile. A Dockerfile can be considered as a kind of source code that…

Much of the success of modern software development can be attributed to code reuse. The ability to reuse existing functionality via third-party dependencies has enabled massive gains in productivity, but for a long time the dominant…

For teams using distributed version control systems, the right collaborative development workflows can help maintaining the long-term quality of project repositories and improving work efficiency. Despite the fact that the workflows are…

Despite the immense popularity of the Automated Program Repair (APR) field, the question of patch validation is still open. Most of the present-day approaches follow the so-called Generate-and-Validate approach, where first a candidate…

The notion of software ''fork'' has been shifting over time from the (negative) phenomenon of community disagreements that result in the creation of separate development lines and ultimately software products, to the (positive) practice of…

To evaluate software maintenance techniques and tools in controlled experiments with human participants, researchers currently use projects and tasks selected on an ad-hoc basis. This can unrealistically favor their tool, and it makes the…

Encountering outdated documentation is not a rare occurrence for developers and users in the software engineering community. To ensure that software documentation is up-to-date, developers often have to manually check whether the…

Linux users expect fresh packages in the official repositories of their distributions. Yet, due to philosophical divergences, the packages available in various distributions do not all have the same degree of freshness. Users therefore need…

Developers rely on open-source packages and must review dependencies to safeguard against vulnerable or malicious upstream code. A careful review of all dependencies changes often does not occur in practice. Therefore, developers need…

Scientific software is essential to scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Abandoned (or unmaintained), buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software can…

Contemporary software documentation is as complicated as the software itself. During its lifecycle, the documentation accumulates a lot of near duplicate fragments, i.e. chunks of text that were copied from a single source and were later…

The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to…

Motivated by applications of distributed storage systems to key-value stores, the multi-version coding problem was formulated to efficiently store frequently updated data in asynchronous decentralized storage systems. Inspired by…