Related papers: Where do developers admit their security-related c…
With the increasing reliance on software and automation nowadays, tight deadlines, limited resources, and prioritization of functionality over security can lead to insecure coding practices. When not handled properly, these constraints…
Knowledge sharing plays a crucial role throughout all software application development activities. When programmers learn and share through media like Stack overflow, GitHub, Meetups, videos, discussion forums, wikis, and blogs, every…
A tenet of open source software development is to accept contributions from users-developers (typically after appropriate vetting). But should this also include interventions done as part of research on open source development? Following an…
GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…
Peer code review has been found to be effective in identifying security vulnerabilities. However, despite practicing mandatory code reviews, many Open Source Software (OSS) projects still encounter a large number of post-release security…
Vulnerabilities in open source packages can be a security risk for the client projects that use these packages as dependencies. When a new vulnerability is discovered in a package, the package should quickly release a fix in a new version,…
With the wave of high-profile supply chain attacks targeting development and client organizations, supply chain security has recently become a focal point. As a result, there is an elevated discussion on securing the development environment…
Categorization via gender is omnipresent throughout society, and thus also computing; gender identity is often requested of users before they use software or web services. Despite this fact, no research has explored how software developers…
GitHub provides developers with a practical way to distribute source code and collaboratively work on common projects. To enhance account security and privacy, GitHub allows its users to manage access permissions, review audit logs, and…
In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones that…
Typical users are known to use and reuse weak passwords. Yet, as cybersecurity concerns continue to rise, understanding the password practices of software developers becomes increasingly important. In this work, we examine developers'…
As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…
Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a form of Technical Debt where developers document the debt using source code comments (SATD-C) or issues (SATD-I). However, it is still unclear the circumstances that drive developers to choose one or…
Statically-annotated types have been shown to aid developers in a number of programming tasks, and this benefit holds true even when static type checking is not used. It is hypothesized that this is because developers use type annotations…
[Background] In large open-source software projects, development knowledge is often fragmented across multiple artefacts and contributors such that individual stakeholders are generally unaware of the full breadth of the product features.…
Current legal frameworks enforce that Android developers accurately report the data their apps collect. However, large codebases can make this reporting challenging. This paper employs an empirical approach to understand developers'…
Context. Detecting Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is crucial for proactive software maintenance. Previous research has primarily targeted detecting and prioritizing SATD, with little focus on the source code afflicted with SATD. Our…
The absolute majority of software today is developed collaboratively using collaborative version control tools such as Git. It is a common practice that once a vulnerability is detected and fixed, the developers behind the software issue a…
Software engineering has long studied how software developers work, building a body of work which forms the foundation of many software engineering best practices, tools, and theories. Recently, some developers have begun recording videos…
Easy and mostly free access to the internet has resulted in the growing use of open source software (OSS). However, it is a common perception that closed proprietary software is still superior in areas such as software maintenance and…