Related papers: A Longitudinal Study of Dependency Reclassificatio…

The Maven Central ecosystem forms the backbone of Java dependency management, hosting artifacts that vary significantly in their adoption, security, and ecosystem roles. Artifact reuse is fundamental in software development, with ecosystems…

Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase,…

A software release note is one of the essential documents in the software development life cycle. The software release contains a set of information, e.g., bug fixes and security fixes. Release notes are used in different phases, e.g.,…

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…

The Web is a tangled mass of interconnected services, where websites import a range of external resources from various third-party domains. However, the latter can further load resources hosted on other domains. For each website, this…

Deep learning (DL) applications, built upon a heterogeneous and complex DL stack (e.g., Nvidia GPU, Linux, CUDA driver, Python runtime, and TensorFlow), are subject to software and hardware dependencies across the DL stack. One challenge in…

Incremental and parallel builds performed by build tools such as Make are the heart of modern C/C++ software projects. Their correct and efficient execution depends on build scripts. However, build scripts are prone to errors. The most…

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

Refactoring is one of the most important activities in software engineering which is used to improve the quality of a software system. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, researchers are attempting to apply deep learning…

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) as coding agents promises to accelerate software development, but their impact on generated code reproducibility remains largely unexplored. This paper presents an empirical study investigating…

The management of third-party package dependencies is crucial to most technology stacks, with package managers acting as brokers to ensure that a verified package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity…

Large Language Models have advanced automated software development, however, it remains a challenge to correctly infer dependencies, namely, identifying the internal components and external packages required for a repository to successfully…

While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a…

As one of the most well-known programmer Q&A websites, Stack Overflow (i.e., SO) is serving tens of thousands of developers every day. Previous work has shown that many developers reuse the code snippets on SO when they find an answer (from…

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…

Multitasking has always been an inherent part of software development and is known as the primary source of interruptions due to task switching in software development teams. Developing software involves a mix of analytical and creative…

Legacy software systems typically include vital data for organizations that use them and should thus to be regularly maintained. Ideally, organizations should rely on Requirements Engineers to understand and manage changes of stakeholder…

In modern software ecosystems, dependency management plays a critical role in ensuring secure and maintainable applications. However, understanding the relationship between release practices and their impact on vulnerabilities and update…

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…

Contracts are a form of lightweight formal specification embedded in the program text. Being executable parts of the code, they encourage programmers to devote proper attention to specifications, and help maintain consistency between…