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Modern software systems are expected to be secure and contain all the latest features, even when new versions of software are released multiple times an hour. Each system may include many interacting packages. The problem of installing…

Mutation testing has been demonstrated to be one of the most powerful fault-revealing tools in the tester's tool kit. Much previous work implicitly assumed it to be sufficient to re-compute mutant suites per release. Sadly, this makes…

Reusable software components, typically distributed as packages, are a central paradigm of modern software development. The JavaScript ecosystem serves as a prime example, offering millions of packages with their use being promoted as…

After working for some time, developers commit their code changes to a version control system. When doing so, they often bundle unrelated changes (e.g., bug fix and refactoring) in a single commit, thus creating a so-called tangled commit.…

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…

The rapid evolution of software libraries presents a significant challenge for code generation models, which must adapt to frequent version updates while maintaining compatibility with previous versions. Existing code completion benchmarks…

Dockerfiles enable the creation of portable container-based execution environments for the application code, and have become an important part of the modern software development process. As Dockerfiles are a form of Infrastructure-as-Code…

Modern software systems, such as Spark, are usually written in multiple programming languages (PLs). Besides benefiting from code reuse, such systems can also take advantages of specific PLs to implement certain features, to meet various…

Version control systems for source code, such as Git, are key tools in modern software development environments. Many developers use online services, such as GitHub or GitLab, for collaborative software development. While software projects…

With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…

An increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies. To assist these developers, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple technologies, i.e., a…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

Belle II is a rapidly growing collaboration with members from one hundred and nineteen institutes spread around the globe. The software development team of the experiment, as well as the software users, are very much decentralised. Together…

Software ecosystems (e.g., npm, PyPI) are the backbone of modern software developments. Developers add new packages to ecosystems every day to solve new problems or provide alternative solutions, causing obsolete packages to decline in…

Developer contribution guidelines are used in social coding sites like GitHub to explain and shape the process a project expects contributors to follow. They set standards for all participants and "save time and hassle caused by improperly…

Code Review plays a crucial role in software quality, by allowing reviewers to discuss and critique any new patches before they can be successfully integrated into the project code. Yet, it is unsure the extent to which coding pattern…

Contemporary development projects benefit from code review as it improves the quality of a project. Large ecosystems of inter-dependent projects like OpenStack generate a large number of reviews, which poses new challenges for collaboration…

Mining software repositories is a useful technique for researchers and practitioners to see what software developers actually do when developing software. Tools like Boa provide users with the ability to easily mine these open-source…

Third-party libraries (TPLs) are frequently reused in software to reduce development cost and the time to market. However, external library dependencies may introduce vulnerabilities into host applications. The issue of library dependency…

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…