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Mocking is a common unit testing technique that is used to simplify tests, reduce flakiness, and improve coverage by replacing real dependencies with simplified implementations. Despite its widespread use in Open Source Software projects,…
The release note is an essential software artifact of open-source software that documents crucial information about changes, such as new features and bug fixes. With the help of release notes, both developers and users could have a general…
Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…
Given programming languages can provide different types and levels of security support, it is critically important to consider security aspects while selecting programming languages for developing software systems. Inadequate consideration…
Third-party libraries are a central building block to develop software systems. However, outdated third-party libraries are commonly used, and developers are usually less aware of the potential risks. Therefore, a quantitative and holistic…
Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…
In the current IT world, developers write code while system operators run the code mostly as a black box. The connection between both worlds is typically established with log messages: the developer provides hints to the (unknown) operator,…
Vulnerability detection plays a key role in secure software development. There are many different vulnerability detection tools and techniques to choose from, and insufficient information on which vulnerability detection techniques to use…
High-quality software products rely on both well-written source code and timely detection and thorough reporting of bugs. However, some programmers view bug reports as negative assessments of their work, leading them to withhold reporting…
The increasing interest in open source software has led to the emergence of large language-specific package distributions of reusable software libraries, such as npm and RubyGems. These software packages can be subject to vulnerabilities…
Reusing software libraries is a pillar of modern software engineering. In 2022, the average Java application depends on 40 third-party libraries. Relying on such libraries exposes a project to potential vulnerabilities and may put an…
Context: Software practitioners adopt approaches like DevOps, Scrum, and Waterfall for high-quality software development. However, limited research has been conducted on exploring software development approaches concerning practitioners…
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) have become fundamental to modern software development, with GitHub Actions (GHA) emerging as a dominant automation platform. In this study, we analyze real-world execution records of…
Vulnerabilities in software libraries and reusable components cause major security challenges, particularly in dependency-heavy ecosystems such as Maven. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of vulnerabilities in the Maven ecosystem…
The disclosure of the Log4Shell vulnerability in December 2021 led to an unprecedented wave of global scanning and exploitation activity. A recent study provided important initial insights, but was largely limited in duration and geography,…
Background. Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, and are employed both in open-source and industrial contexts. One of the main goals of code reviews is to find defects in the code, allowing…
The use of free and open source software (FOSS) components in all software systems is estimated to be above 90%. With such high usage and because of the heterogeneity of FOSS tools, repositories, developers and ecosystem, the level of…
Security researchers are interested in security vulnerabilities, but these security vulnerabilities create risks for stakeholders. Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure has been an accepted best practice for many years in disclosing newly…
Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…
Logging statements are essential for software debugging and maintenance. However, existing approaches to automatic logging generation rely on static analysis and produce statements in a single pass without considering runtime behavior. They…