Related papers: Does the Tool Matter? Exploring Some Causes of Thr…
Context: Mining software repositories is a popular means to gain insights into a software project's evolution, monitor project health, support decisions and derive best practices. Tools supporting the mining process are commonly applied by…
With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…
Mining Software Repositories (MSRs) is an evidence-based methodology that cross-links data to uncover actionable information about software systems. Empirical studies in software engineering often leverage MSR techniques as they allow…
A vigorous and growing set of technical debt analysis tools have been developed in recent years -- both research tools and industrial products -- such as Structure 101, SonarQube, and DV8. Each of these tools identifies problematic files…
The use of third-party packages is becoming increasingly popular and has led to the emergence of large software package ecosystems with a maze of inter-dependencies. Since the reliance on these ecosystems enables developers to reduce…
Software development projects involve the use of a wide range of tools to produce a software artifact. Software repositories such as source control systems have become a focus for emergent research because they are a source of rich…
Machine learning (ML) is an increasingly important scientific tool supporting decision making and knowledge generation in numerous fields. With this, it also becomes more and more important that the results of ML experiments are…
Context: Research software is essential for developing advanced tools and models to solve complex research problems and drive innovation across domains. Therefore, it is essential to ensure its correctness. Software testing plays a vital…
One of the essential requisites of any software industry is the development of customer satisfied products. However, accomplishing the aforesaid business objective depends upon the depth of quality of product that is engineered in the…
Background: Data mining and analyzing of public Git software repositories is a growing research field. The tools used for studies that investigate a single project or a group of projects have been refined, but it is not clear whether the…
Dependency analysis is recognized as an important field of software engineering due to a variety of reasons. There exists a large pool of tools providing assistance to software developers and architects. Analysis of inter- and intra-project…
CONTEXT: There is growing interest in establishing software engineering as an evidence-based discipline. To that end, replication is often used to gain confidence in empirical findings, as opposed to reproduction where the goal is showing…
Just because software developers say they believe in "X", that does not necessarily mean that "X" is true. As shown here, there exist numerous beliefs listed in the recent Software Engineering literature which are only supported by small…
Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…
The causes of the reproducibility crisis include lack of standardization and transparency in scientific reporting. Checklists such as ARRIVE and CONSORT seek to improve transparency, but they are not always followed by authors and peer…
The purpose of scholarly peer review is to evaluate the quality of scientific manuscripts. However, study after study demonstrates that peer review neither effectively nor reliably assesses research quality. Empirical standards attempt to…
Background: Research software plays an important role in solving real-life problems, empowering scientific innovations, and handling emergency situations. Therefore, the correctness and trustworthiness of research software are of absolute…
The design of software development tools follows from what the developers of such tools believe is true about software development. A key aspect of such beliefs is the size of code contributions (commits) to a software project. In this…
User studies are paramount for advancing science. However, researchers face several barriers when performing them despite the existence of supporting tools. In this work, we study how existing tools and their features cope with previously…
Sentiment analysis methods have become popular for investigating human communication, including discussions related to software projects. Since general-purpose sentiment analysis tools do not fit well with the information exchanged by…