Related papers: Peer Code Review in Research Software Development:…
Experimentation with software prototypes plays a fundamental role in software engineering research. In contrast to many other scientific disciplines, however, explicit support for this key activity in software engineering is relatively…
This study investigates the challenges in designing research infrastructure software for automated software publication in multi-stakeholder environments, focusing specifically on the HERMES system. Through two quantitative surveys of…
Software Engineering activities are information intensive. Research proposes Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to support engineers in their daily tasks, such as establishing and maintaining traceability links, fault identification, and…
Although agile software development methods have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide, scientific research still remains quite scarce. The aim of this study is to order and make sense of the different agile…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
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…
This position paper describes the Parsl open source research software project and its various phases over seven years. It defines four types of research software engineers (RSEs) who have been important to the project in those phases; we…
Background: Code reviewing is an essential part of software development to ensure software quality. However, the abundance of review tasks and the intensity of the workload for reviewers negatively impact the quality of the reviews. The…
Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…
Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…
Dedicated software search engines that index open source software repositories or in-house software assets significantly enhance the chance of finding software components suitable for reuse. However, they still leave the work of evaluating…
As software has become an integral part of scientific workflows, reproducible research practices must take it into account. In what way? Archiving source code is a necessary but insufficient condition. The ability to redeploy software…
Empirical Standards are natural-language models of a scientific community's expectations for a specific kind of study (e.g. a questionnaire survey). The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative generated empirical standards for…
Context: Innovation thrives on scientific software, with useful code review feedback enhancing its correctness and impact. However, unlike general-purpose commercial and open-source software, the usefulness of code review feedback (CR…
While the methodological rigor of computing research has improved considerably in the past two decades, quantitative software engineering research is hampered by immature measures and inattention to theory. Measurement-the principled…
Code review is widely known as one of the best practices for software quality assurance in software development. In a typical code review process, reviewers check the code committed by developers to ensure the quality of the code, during…
Evidence-based practice (EBP) in software engineering aims to improve decision-making in software development by complementing practitioners' professional judgment with high-quality evidence from research. We believe the use of EBP…
The rapid expansion of software development has significant environmental, technical, social, and economic impacts. Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 compels developers to adopt sustainable practices.…
Representative sampling appears rare in empirical software engineering research. Not all studies need representative samples, but a general lack of representative sampling undermines a scientific field. This article therefore reports a…
Background: Despite a long history, numerous laws and regulations, ethics remains an unnatural topic for many software engineering researchers. Poor research ethics may lead to mistrust of research results, lost funding and retraction of…