Related papers: Comments or Issues: Where to Document Technical De…
Communication is essential in software development, and even more in distributed settings. Communication activities need to be organized and coordinated to defend against the threat of productivity losses, increases in cognitive load, and…
Artificial Intelligence systems, which benefit from the availability of large-scale datasets and increasing computational power, have become effective solutions to various critical tasks, such as natural language understanding, speech…
This paper presents an analysis of technical debt management through resources allocation policies in software maintenance process during its operation to demonstrate how different strategies leads to the emergence of different behaviors…
Code comments are important artifacts in software systems and play a paramount role in many software engineering (SE) tasks related to maintenance and program comprehension. However, while it is widely accepted that high quality matters in…
Context: Addressing user requests in the form of bug reports and Github issues represents a crucial task of any successful software project. However, user-submitted issue reports tend to widely differ in their quality, and developers spend…
Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…
Objective. In this work, we report the experience of a Finnish SME in managing Technical Debt (TD), investigating the most common types of TD they faced in the past, their causes, and their effects. Method. We set up a focus group in the…
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…
Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD), a concept highlighting sub-optimal choices in software development documented in code comments or other project resources, poses challenges in the maintainability and evolution of software systems. Large…
We present the Code Documentation and Analysis Tool (CoDAT). CoDAT is a tool designed to maintain consistency between the various levels of code documentation, e.g. if a line in a code sketch is changed, the comment that documents the…
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…
Technical Debt management decisions always imply a trade-off among outcomes at different points in time. In such intertemporal choices, distant outcomes are often valued lower than close ones, a phenomenon known as temporal discounting.…
Software developers are social creatures: they communicate, collaborate, and promote their work in a variety of channels. Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and other platforms offer developers opportunities to network and exchange ideas.…
Context. Technical debt (TD) items are constructs in a software system providing short-term benefits but hindering future changes. TD management (TDM) is frequently researched but rarely adopted in practice. Goal. This study aimed to…
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…
Popular and large contemporary open-source projects now embrace a diverse set of documentation for communication channels. Examples include contribution guidelines (i.e., commit message guidelines, coding rules, submission guidelines), code…
AI coding assistants and autonomous agents are becoming integral to software development workflows, reshaping how code is produced, reviewed, and maintained. While recent research has focused mainly on the capabilities and impacts of…
Bots are frequently used in Github repositories to automate repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. They communicate with human actors through comments. While detecting their presence is…
Background: Despite the widespread use of automated security defect detection tools, software projects still contain many security defects that could result in serious damage. Such tools are largely context-insensitive and may not cover all…
Open source software projects usually acknowledge contributions with text files, websites, and other idiosyncratic methods. These data sources are hard to mine, which is why contributorship is most frequently measured through changes to…