Related papers: Ecosystem-wide influences on pull request decision…
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…
In nature ecosystems, animal life-spans are determined by genes and some other biological characteristics. Similarly, the software project life-spans are related to some internal or external characteristics. Analyzing the relations between…
Software developers typically rely upon a large network of dependencies to build their applications. For instance, the NPM package repository contains over 3 million packages and serves tens of billions of downloads weekly. Understanding…
The npm (Node Package Manager) ecosystem is the most important package manager for JavaScript development with millions of users. Consequently, a plethora of earlier work investigated how vulnerability reporting, patch propagation, and in…
Crowdsourcing and data mining can be used to effectively reduce the effort associated with the partial replication and enhancement of qualitative studies. For example, in a primary study, other researchers explored factors influencing the…
This study examines the impact of GitHub Copilot on a large sample of Copilot users (n=934,533). The analysis shows that users on average accept nearly 30% of the suggested code, leading to increased productivity. Furthermore, our research…
As a maintainer of an open source software project, you are usually happy about contributions in the form of pull requests that bring the project a step forward. Past studies have shown that when reviewing a pull request, not only its…
Background: Evolution of open source projects frequently depends on a small number of core developers. The loss of such core developers might be detrimental for projects and even threaten their entire continuation. However, it is possible…
Due to the difficulties in replicating and scaling up qualitative studies, such studies are rarely verified. Accordingly, in this paper, we leverage the advantages of crowdsourcing (low costs, fast speed, scalable workforce) to replicate…
Background: Open source software ecosystems exhibit dense dependency networks in which maintenance degradation of structurally central packages can propagate widely. Despite increasing attention to open source sustainability, existing…
Pull request latency evaluation is an essential application of effort evaluation in the pull-based development scenario. It can help the reviewers sort the pull request queue, remind developers about the review processing time, speed up the…
A risk in adopting third-party dependencies into an application is their potential to serve as a doorway for malicious code to be injected (most often unknowingly). While many initiatives from both industry and research communities focus on…
ChatGPT has significantly impacted software development practices, providing substantial assistance to developers in a variety of tasks, including coding, testing, and debugging. Despite its widespread adoption, the impact of ChatGPT as an…
Breaking changes cause a lot of effort to both downstream and upstream developers: downstream developers need to adapt to breaking changes and upstream developers are responsible for identifying and documenting them. In the NPM ecosystem,…
Background: Widespread use of third-party libraries makes ecosystems like Node Package Manager (npm) critical to modern software development. However, this interconnected chain of dependencies also creates challenges: bugs in one library…
The risk to using third-party libraries in a software application is that much needed maintenance is solely carried out by library maintainers. These libraries may rely on a core team of maintainers (who might be a single maintainer that is…
Open Source Software (OSS) project success relies on crowd contributions. When an issue arises in pull-request based systems, @-mentions are used to call on people to task; previous studies have shown that @-mentions in discussions are…
On open source software (OSS) platforms such as GitHub, forking and accepting pull-requests is an important approach for OSS projects to receive contributions, especially from external contributors who cannot directly commit into the source…
Selecting third-party software packages in open-source ecosystems like Python is challenging due to the large number of alternatives and limited transparent evidence for comparison. Generative AI tools are increasingly used in development…
The fork-based development mechanism provides the flexibility and the unified processes for software teams to collaborate easily in a distributed setting without too much coordination overhead.Currently, multiple social coding platforms…