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Understanding the evolution of software systems is crucial for advancing software engineering practices. Many studies have been devoted to exploring software evolution. However, they primarily treat software as an entire entity and overlook the ...

This study investigates the evolutionary differences in code features between kernel and nonkernel components in operating systems. Findings show kernel code is smaller, and less frequently modified than nonkernel code, with a preference for alteration ...

Good component‐based design for software projects is a desired property both for development and maintenance. The C++ programming language inherited the “translation unit” model from C, where every source file is individually compiled with no ...

This paper investigates a semi‐automatic modularization method to refactor existing C++ projects. Our approach uses dependency analysis and clustering to organize elements of projects into modules, without domain‐specific information. To fully facilitate ...

Structured merge tools exploit programming language syntactic structure to enhance merge accuracy by reducing spurious conflicts reported by unstructured tools. By creating and handling full ASTs, structured tools are language-specific and harder to ...

Configurability is a common property of software allowing programs to be customized for the user. While configurability is pervasive, it can also lead to faults (or misconfigurations) and make program evolution challenging. Dependencies can be missed, ...

Background. A smart contract is a computer program enclosing the terms of a legal agreement between two or more parties which is automatically verified and executed via a computer network called blockchain. Once a smart contract transaction is completed ...

The undocumented evolution of a software project and its underlying architecture underscores the need to recover the architecture from the software's implementation‐level artifacts. Despite the existence of various software remodularization ...

Automated construction of reference model (ACRM) automatically constructs reference models by assigning weights to classes for various software projects using the metadata of all software versions and historical maintenance records. ACRM can aid ...

Every software system undergoes changes, for example, to add new features, fix bugs, or refactor code. The importance of understanding software changes has been widely recognized, resulting in various techniques and studies, for instance, on change-impact ...

Runtime verification (RV) monitors program executions against formal specifications (specs). Researchers showed that RV during software testing amplifies the bug-finding ability of tests, and found hundreds of new bugs by using RV to monitor passing ...

Tracing features to software artifacts is a crucial yet challenging activity for developers of variability-intensive software projects. Developers can provide feature traces either proactively in a manual and rarely semi-automated way or recover them ...

In software development, developer turnover is among the primary reasons for project failures, leading to a great void of knowledge and strain for newcomers. Unfortunately, no established methods exist to measure how the problem domain knowledge ...

This study aims at measuring how knowledge is distributed within software development teams and to understand how it evolves. To gain this understanding and how knowledge is owned by key developers, this work introduces a novel representation of domain ...

Design patterns represent a means of communicating reusable solutions to common problems, provided they are implemented and maintained correctly. However, many design pattern instances erode as they age, sacrificing qualities they once provided. ...

Design patterns may exhibit symptoms of behavioral decay, wherein improper behavioral extensions of the pattern negatively affect the quality of the software. We validate types of behavioral decay found from real‐world pattern instances and evaluate the ...

Sharing research artifacts (e.g., software, data, protocols) is an immensely important topic for improving transparency, replicability, and reusability in research, and has recently gained more and more traction in software engineering. For instance, ...

Libraries play a significant role in software development as they provide reusable functionality, which helps expedite the development process. As libraries evolve, they release new versions with optimisations like new functionality, bug fixes, and ...

Diff tools are essential in developers' daily workflows and software engineering research. Motivated by limitations of traditional line-based differencing, countless specialized diff tools have been proposed, aware of the underlying artifacts' type, such ...

Cross‐version defect prediction (CVDP) for evolutionary projects has attracted much attention from researchers in recent years. For multiple versions of an object‐oriented project, the degree of evolution (e.g., the degree of class change) ...

This paper proposes six evolutionary measures named the Ratio of New Classes, the Ratio of Deleted Classes, the Average Ratio of Metric Change, the Ratio of Label Changed Classes, the Ratio of Unchanged Classes, and the Ratio of Interference Classes. ...

Open source software (OSS) has been developing for more than two decades. It originated as a movement with the introduction of the first free/libre OSS operating system, became a popular trend among the developer community, led to enterprise ...

• The proposed framework successfully classified resilient and nonresilient projects
• Resilience scores of social dimension are increased for user oriented open source software (OSS) projects.
• OSS projects started as solo maintained scored low ...

Hugging Face (HF) has established itself as a crucial platform for the development and sharing of machine learning (ML) models. This repository mining study, which delves into more than 380,000 models using data gathered via the HF Hub API, aims to ...

The GitHub social coding platform introduced GitHub Actions as a way to automate different aspects of collaborative software development through the use of workflow files. It is the most popular CI/CD and workflow automation tool for GitHub. To maintain ...

GitHub Actions is the de facto workflow automation tool for GitHub repositories. Its popularity has increased dramatically over the recent years, opening up opportunities for empirical studies related to its usage. To enable such studies, we implemented ...

Machine Learning (ML) systems are gaining popularity, reshaping various domains ranging from customer services to software engineering. The effectiveness of ML systems is dependent on the quality of their training data. Therefore, practitioners invest ...