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Introduction: Digital products increasingly reshape industries, influencing human behavior and decision-making. However, the software development teams developing these systems often lack diversity, which may lead to designs that overlook the needs, equal ...

Background: Test flakiness is a major problem in the software industry. Flaky tests fail seemingly at random without changes to the code and thus impede continuous integration (CI). Some researchers argue that all tests can be considered flaky and that ...

Technical debt has become a well-known metaphor among software professionals, illustrating how shortcuts taken during development can accumulate and become a burden for software projects. In the traditional notion of technical debt, software developers ...

Context: Regression testing aims to prevent code changes from breaking existing features. Flaky tests negatively affect regression testing because they result in test failures that are not necessarily caused by code changes, thus providing an ambiguous ...

Understanding and managing monetary cost factors is crucial when developing cloud applications. However, the diverse range of factors influencing costs for computation, storage, and networking in cloud applications poses a challenge for developers ...

Commit messages contain diverse and valuable types of knowledge in all aspects of software maintenance and evolution. Links are an example of such knowledge. Previous work on “9.6 million links in source code comments” showed that links are prone ...

The intersection of ageism and sexism can create a hostile environment for veteran software developers belonging to marginalized genders. In this study, we conducted 14 interviews to examine the experiences of people at this intersection, primarily ...

Confusion over different kinds of secondary research, and their divergent purposes, is undermining the effectiveness and usefulness of secondary studies in software engineering. This short paper therefore explains the differences between ad hoc review,...

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 critical ...

Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in isolation, and ...

Discussions is a new feature of GitHub for asking questions or discussing topics outside of specific Issues or Pull Requests. Before being available to all projects in December 2020, it had been tested on selected open source software projects. To ...

To solve programming issues, developers commonly search on Stack Overflow to seek potential solutions. However, there is a gap between the knowledge developers are interested in and the knowledge they are able to retrieve using search engines. To help ...

As a popular Q&A site for programming, Stack Overflow is a treasure for developers. However, the amount of questions and answers on Stack Overflow make it difficult for developers to efficiently locate the information they are looking for. There are two ...

As a novel coronavirus swept the world in early 2020, thousands of software developers began working from home. Many did so on short notice, under difficult and stressful conditions.

This study investigates the effects of the ...

To improve software engineering, software repositories have been mined for code snippets and bug fixes. Typically, this mining takes place at the level of files or commits. To be able to dig deeper and to extract insights at a higher resolution, we ...

Despite the unarguable importance of Stack Overflow (SO) for the daily work of many software developers and despite existing knowledge about the impact of code duplication on software maintainability, the prevalence and implications of code clones on SO ...

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of copyable code snippets. Using those snippets raises maintenance and legal issues. SO's license (CC BY-SA 3.0) requires attribution, ...

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of copyable code snippets. Like other software artifacts, code on SO evolves over time, for example when bugs are fixed or APIs are ...

A core goal of Continuous Integration (CI) is to make small incremental changes to software projects, which are integrated frequently into a mainline repository or branch. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates if developers adjust ...