Related papers: An Empirical Study on Method-Level Performance Evo…

Context: In the realm of software development, maintaining high software quality is a persistent challenge. However, this challenge is often impeded by the lack of comprehensive understanding of how specific code modifications influence…

Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code, but can they generate fast code for complex, real-world software systems? In this study, we investigate this question using a dataset of 65 tasks mined from performance-critical open-source…

Modern software systems rely on dependency networks of reusable libraries, where breaking changes propagate and cause downstream consumers to fail. Despite growing research across ecosystems, no comprehensive synthesis exists. We conduct a…

One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…

Code changes are performed differently in the mobile and non-mobile platforms. Prior work has investigated the differences in specific platforms. However, we still lack a deeper understanding of how code changes evolve across different…

We analyse the time evolution of two open source Java projects: Eclipse and Netbeans, both developed following agile practices, though to a different extent. Our study is centered on quality analysis of the systems, measured as defects…

To explore the prevalence of abrupt changes (changepoints) in open source project activity, we assembled a dataset of 8,919 projects from the World of Code. Projects were selected based on age, number of commits, and number of authors.…

Many internal software metrics and external quality attributes of Java programs correlate strongly with program size. This knowledge has been used pervasively in quantitative studies of software through practices such as normalization on…

[Background/Context] AI assistants like GitHub Copilot are transforming software engineering; several studies have highlighted productivity improvements. However, their impact on code quality, particularly in terms of maintainability,…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source…

Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…

Our study is focused on an evaluation of the maintainability characteristic in the context of the long-term evolution of open-source software. According to well established software quality models such as the ISO 9126 and the more recent…

The source code of Function as a Service (FaaS) applications is constantly being refined. To detect if a source code change introduces a significant performance regression, the traditional benchmarking approach evaluates both the old and…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

Prior literature has suggested that in many projects 80\% or more of the contributions are made by a small called group of around 20% of the development team. Most prior studies deprecate a reliance on such a small inner group of "heroes",…

Existing innovation metrics inadequately capture software innovation, creating blind spots for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand and foster technological innovation in an increasingly software-defined economy. This paper…

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…