Related papers: An insight into the technical debt-fix trade off i…

Technical Debts (TD) are problems of the internal software quality. They are often contracted due to tight project deadlines, for example quick fixes and workarounds, and can make future changes more costly or impossible. TD prevention…

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) encompasses a wide array of sub-optimal design and implementation choices reported in software artefacts (e.g., code comments and commit messages) by developers themselves. Such reports have been central…

The focus on rapid software delivery inevitably results in the accumulation of technical debt, which, in turn, affects quality and slows future development. Yet, companies with a long history of rapid delivery exist. Our primary aim is to…

When developing software, it is vitally important to keep the level of technical debt down since it is well established from several studies that technical debt can, e.g., lower the development productivity, decrease the developers' morale,…

Python is a widely adopted programming language, valued for its simplicity and flexibility. However, its dynamic type system poses significant challenges for automated refactoring - an essential practice in software evolution aimed at…

The widespread adoption of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) means that the ongoing maintenance of many widely used software components relies on the collaborative effort of volunteers who set their own priorities and choose their…

Context: Technical Debt needs to be managed to avoid disastrous consequences, and investigating developers' habits concerning technical debt management is invaluable information in software development. Objective: This study aims to…

Library dependencies in software ecosystems play a crucial role in the development of software. As newer releases of these libraries are published, developers may opt to pin their dependencies to a particular version. While pinning may have…

Motivation: Technical debt is a metaphor that describes not-quite-right code introduced for short-term needs. Developers are aware of it and admit it in source code comments, which is called Self- Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). Therefore,…

Fixing software faults contributes significantly to the cost of software maintenance and evolution. Techniques for reducing these costs require datasets of software faults, as well as an understanding of the faults, for optimal testing and…

Background: Software security is crucial to ensure that the users are protected from undesirable consequences such as malware attacks which can result in loss of data and, subsequently, financial loss. Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor…

Understanding how software defects manifest and evolve in production environments is critical for improving reliability. While previous research has largely focused on pre-release defects, the nature of residual faults, i.e., those escaping…

Industry practitioners are increasingly concerned with software that contains vulnerable versions of third-party dependencies that are included both directly and transitively. To address this problem, projects are encouraged to both…

One of the biggest strength of many modern programming languages is their rich open source package ecosystem. Indeed, modern language-specific package managers have made it much easier to share reusable code and depend on components written…

To comply with high productivity demands, software developers reuse free open-source software (FOSS) code to avoid reinventing the wheel when incorporating software features. The reliance on FOSS reuse has been shown to improve productivity…

Software development is a very broad activity that captures the entire life cycle of a software, which includes designing, programming, maintenance and so on. In this study, we focus on the maintenance-related concerns of the…

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD), referring to comments flagged by developers that explicitly acknowledge suboptimal code or incomplete functionality, has received extensive attention in machine learning (ML) and traditional (Non-ML)…

Context: Modern software systems (e.g., Apache Spark) are usually written in multiple programming languages (PLs). There is little understanding on the phenomenon of multi-programming-language commits (MPLCs), which involve modified source…

In finance, leverage is the ratio between assets borrowed from others and one's own assets. A matching situation is present in software: by using free open-source software (FOSS) libraries a developer leverages on other people's code to…

Tests that cause spurious failures without any code changes, i.e., flaky tests, hamper regression testing, increase maintenance costs, may shadow real bugs, and decrease trust in tests. While the prevalence and importance of flakiness is…