Background: There are a number of academic courses in the Bachelor Program in Computer Science (CS) on the design of Web apps. Often the internal and external quality of the developed Web apps is not adequately taken into account. Aim: We aimed to (i) ...

Pair Programming (PP) is an Agile software development methodology that involves two developers working together on a single computer. However, the physical presence of two developers has become a challenge in recent years due to the pandemic, ...

Changes to a software project are inevitable as the software requires continuous adaptations, improvements, and corrections throughout maintenance. Identifying the purpose and impact of changes made to the codebase is critical in software engineering. ...

Making sub-optimal design decisions during software development leads to the accumulation of Technical Debt (TD) in software projects. There are tools to identify TD Items in software code through static code analysis. However, quantifying TD to ...

As a part of a research project concerning software maintainability assessment in collaboration with the development team, we wanted to explore dissensions between developers and the confounding effect of size. To this end, this study replicated and ...

The fast distribution and deployment of security patches are important to protect users against cyberattacks. These fixes can be detected automatically by patch management triage systems. However, previous work has shown that automating the task is not ...

In the last years, the raise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its pervasiveness in our lives, has sparked a flourishing debate about the ethical principles that should lead its implementation and use in society. Driven by these concerns, we conduct ...

Industrial applications heavily integrate open-source software libraries nowadays. Beyond the benefits that libraries bring, they can also impose a real threat in case a library is affected by a vulnerability but its community is not active in creating ...

This research explores the challenges in agile contract modeling for software innovation projects, particularly for outsourced projects. Literature has presented various methods and frameworks for agile contract management, but there is still a gap in ...

The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of Agile development processes that impact user satisfaction. We used user reviews of OSS smartphone apps and various data from version control systems to examine the relationships, ...

Requirements validation is an important aspect for ensuring high quality software. Commonly used are requirements inspections, where the specification is read from different persons assuming different roles or applying different reading techniques, ...

Social inclusion is a fundamental feature of thriving societies. This paper first investigates barriers for social inclusion in online Software Engineering (SE) communities, by identifying a set of 11 attributes and organising them as a taxonomy. ...

Popular modern code review tools (e.g., Gerrit and GitHub) sort files in a code review in alphabetical order. A prior study (on open-source projects) shows that the changed files’ positions in the code review affect the review process. Their results ...

Technical debt is often the result of Short Run decisions made during code development, which can lead to long-term maintenance costs and risks. Hence, evaluating the progression of a project and understanding related code quality aspects is essential. ...

Background: The UK cyber skills gap/shortage amplifies the broader impact of cyber-attacks, which inflict harms such as privacy and economic loss on wider society. The demand is greatest (and growing fastest) in cyber-enabled disciplines, such as ...

With the recent advent of artificially intelligent pairing partners in software engineering, it is interesting to renew the study of the psychology of pairing. Pair programming provides an attractive way of teaching software engineering to university ...

Binary classifiers are commonly used in software engineering research to estimate several software qualities, e.g., defectiveness or vulnerability. Thus, it is important to adequately evaluate how well binary classifiers perform, before they are used ...

Many advanced program analysis and verification methods are based on solving systems of Constrained Horn Clauses (CHC). Testing CHC solvers is very important, as correctness of their work determines whether bugs in the analyzed programs are detected or ...

Background: Adaptive user interfaces have the advantage of being able to dynamically change their aspect and/or behaviour depending on the characteristics of the context of use, i.e. to improve user experience. User experience is an important quality ...

In DevOps, the traceability of software artifacts is critical to the successful development and operation of project delivery to stakeholders. Before the introduction of end-to-end traceability in DevOps at a Data Analytics team at bp (BP plc), an ...