English
Related papers

Related papers: Less is More? An Empirical Study on Configuration …

200 papers

Type inference for dynamic languages like Python is a persistent challenge in software engineering. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in code understanding, their type inference capabilities remain underexplored. We…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Honghua Dong , Jiacheng Yang , Xun Deng , Yuhe Jiang , Gennady Pekhimenko , Fan Long , Xujie Si

Developers heavily rely on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from libraries to build their software. As software evolves, developers may need to replace the used libraries with alternate libraries, a process known as library…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Mohayeminul Islam , Ajay Kumar Jha , Ildar Akhmetov , Sarah Nadi

BACKGROUND: Vulnerable dependencies are a known problem in today's open-source software ecosystems because OSS libraries are highly interconnected and developers do not always update their dependencies. AIMS: In this paper we aim to present…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-30 Ivan Pashchenko , Henrik Plate , Serena Elisa Ponta , Antonino Sabetta , Fabio Massacci

AI coding agents increasingly modify real software repositories and make dependency decisions, including adding, removing, or updating third-party packages. These choices can materially affect security posture and maintenance burden, yet…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Tanmay Singla , Berk Çakar , Paschal C. Amusuo , James C. Davis

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-10-16 Alexandre Decan , Tom Mens , Philippe Grosjean

Runtime verification (RV) now scales for testing thousands of open-source Java projects, helping find hundreds of bugs. The popular Python ecosystem could use such benefits. But, today's Python RV systems are limited to a domain or…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Zhuohang Shen , Mohammed Yaseen , Denini Silva , Kevin Guan , Junho Lee , Marcelo d'Amorim , Owolabi Legunsen

Modern software systems are often built by leveraging code written by others in the form of libraries and packages to accelerate their development. While there are many benefits to using third-party packages, software projects often become…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Jasmine Latendresse , Suhaib Mujahid , Diego Elias Costa , Emad Shihab

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Hao He , Bogdan Vasilescu , Christian Kästner

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) libraries form the backbone of modern software systems, yet their long-term sustainability often depends on maintainers being reachable for support, coordination, and security reporting. Aims: In this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Alexandros Tsakpinis , Alexander Pretschner

In an era shaped by Generative Artificial Intelligence for code generation and the rising adoption of Python-based Machine Learning systems (MLS), software quality has emerged as a major concern. As these systems grow in complexity and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Mohamed Almukhtar , Anwar Ghammam , Marouane Kessentini , Hua Ming

Android app developers extensively employ code reuse, integrating many third-party libraries into their apps. While such integration is practical for developers, it can be challenging for static analyzers to achieve scalability and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Jordan Samhi , Tegawendé F. Bissyandé , Jacques Klein

Industrial applications heavily rely on open-source software (OSS) libraries, which provide various benefits. But, they can also present a substantial risk if a vulnerability or attack arises and the community fails to promptly address the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Alexandros Tsakpinis , Alexander Pretschner

The rapid evolution of software libraries creates a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), whose static parametric knowledge often becomes stale post-training. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is commonly used to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Ahmed Nusayer Ashik , Shaowei Wang , Tse-Hsun Chen , Muhammad Asaduzzaman , Yuan Tian

Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source…

Many popular Python libraries use C-extensions for performance-critical operations allowing users to combine the best of the two worlds: The simplicity and versatility of Python and the performance of C. A drawback of this approach is that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Lucas Berg , Lukas Krodinger , Stephan Lukasczyk , Annibale Panichella , Gordon Fraser , Wim Vanhoof , Xavier Devroey

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Wei Tang , Zhengzi Xu , Chengwei Liu , Jiahui Wu , Shouguo Yang , Yi Li , Ping Luo , Yang Liu

Python has become the most popular programming language as it is friendly to work with for beginners. However, a recent study has found that most security issues in Python have not been indexed by CVE and may only be fixed by 'silent'…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Shiyu Sun , Shu Wang , Xinda Wang , Yunlong Xing , Elisa Zhang , Kun Sun

Java projects are often built on top of various third-party libraries. If multiple versions of a library exist on the classpath, JVM will only load one version and shadow the others, which we refer to as dependency conflicts. This would…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Ying Wang , Rongxin Wu , Chao Wang , Ming Wen , Yepang Liu , Shing-Chi Cheung , Hai Yu , Chang Xu , Zhiliang Zhu

Code snippets are prevalent, but are hard to reuse because they often lack an accompanying environment configuration. Most are not actively maintained, allowing for drift between the most recent possible configuration and the code snippet…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Eric Horton , Chris Parnin

Open-source software (OSS) plays a crucial role in modern software development. Utilizing OSS code can greatly accelerate software development, reduce redundancy, and enhance reliability. Python, a widely adopted programming language, is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Zhiqing Zhong , Shilin He , Haoxuan Wang , Boxi Yu , Haowen Yang , Pinjia He