Empirical Software Engineering

Large-scale software systems and cloud services continue to produce a large amount of log data. Such log data is usually preserved for a long time (e.g., for auditing purposes). General compressors, like the LZ77 compressor used in gzip, are ...

As societal dependence on software continues to grow, bugs are becoming increasingly costly in terms of financial resources as well as human safety. Bug localization is the process by which a developer identifies buggy code that needs to be fixed ...

For several years, the software engineering research community used eye trackers to study program comprehension, bug localization, pair programming, and other software engineering tasks. Eye trackers provide researchers with insights on software ...

Open source software (OSS) libraries are widely used in the industry to speed up the development of software products. However, these libraries are subject to an ever-increasing number of vulnerabilities that are publicly disclosed. It is thus ...

Studying the causes of technical debt (TD) could aid in TD prevention, thus easing the job of TD management. On the other hand, better understanding of the effects of TD could also aid in TD management by facilitating more informed ...

The establishment of the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) data showcase conference track has encouraged researchers to provide data sets as a basis for further empirical studies. The objective of this study is to examine the usage of data papers ...

In contrast to studies of defects found during code review, we aim to clarify whether code review measures can explain the prevalence of post-release defects.

We replicate McIntosh et al.’s (Empirical Softw. Engg. 21(5): 2146–2189, 2016) ...

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of software aging – namely, the gradual performance degradation and resource exhaustion in the long run – in the Android OS. The study intends to highlight if, and to what extent, devices from different vendors, ...

It is becoming increasingly difficult for game developers to manage the cost of developing a game, while meeting the high expectations of gamers. One way to balance the increasing gamer expectation and development stress is to build an active ...

The ‘as code’ suffix in infrastructure as code (IaC) refers to applying software engineering activities, such as version control, to maintain IaC scripts. Without the application of these activities, defects that can have serious ...

The current generation of software analytics tools are mostly prediction algorithms (e.g. support vector machines, naive bayes, logistic regression, etc). While prediction is useful, after prediction comes planning about what actions to take in ...

Productivity refers to the rate at which a company produces goods, and its observation takes into account the number of people and the amount of other necessary resources to deliver such goods. However, it is not clear how to observe ...

We automate the process of assigning issue reports to development teams by using data mining approaches and share our experience gained by deploying the resulting system, called IssueTAG, at Softtech. Being a subsidiary of the largest private bank ...

The interpretation of defect models heavily relies on software metrics that are used to construct them. Prior work often uses feature selection techniques to remove metrics that are correlated and irrelevant in order to improve model performance. ...

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an established method to implement change in organizations. However, it cannot be applied in the open source (FOSS) communities, without adaptation to their particularities, especially to the specific control ...

In this paper, we base our research on a fictional collective programming scenario: A group of physically-distributed programmers try to collaboratively solve a programming problem in a web-based development environment, through a continually ...

Product Line Engineering (PLE) is a crucial practice in many software development environments where software systems are complex and developed for multiple customers with varying needs. At the same time, many development processes are use case-...

Self-admitted technical debt refers to situations where a software developer knows that their current implementation is not optimal and indicates this using a source code comment. In this work, we hypothesize that it is possible to develop ...

Software-intensive organizations’ rationale for sharing Open Source Software (OSS) may be driven by both idealistic, strategic and commercial objectives, and include both monetary as well as non-monetary benefits. To gain the potential ...

Software design in e-commerce can be improved with user data through controlled experiments (i.e. A/B tests) to better meet user needs. Machine learning-based algorithmic optimization techniques extends the approach to large number of ...

In this article we emphasize that most of the faults, appearing in real-world programs, are complicated and there exists a high interaction between faulty and other correlated statements, that is likely to cause coincidental correctness in many ...

Most models of teamwork describe team behavior and effectiveness using an Input-Process-Output approach. In software engineering, the use of such models has focused on understanding and operationalizing the Process-Output components while ...

Software defect prediction models are classifiers often built by setting a threshold t on a defect proneness model, i.e., a scoring function. For instance, they classify a software module non-faulty if its defect proneness is below t and positive ...

Architecture of a software system represents the key design decisions and therefore its quality plays an important role to keep the software maintainable. Code smells are indicators of quality issues in a software system and are classified ...

Documentation for programming languages and their APIs takes many forms, such as reference documentation, blog posts or other textual and visual media. Prior research has suggested that developers switch between reference and tutorial-like ...

Software engineering is a socio-technical endeavor, and while many of our contributions focus on technical aspects, human stakeholders such as software developers are directly affected by and can benefit from our research and tool innovations. In ...

Performance regressions of large-scale software systems often lead to both financial and reputational losses. In order to detect performance regressions, performance tests are typically conducted in an in-house (non-production) environment using ...

Software teams are often asked to deliver new features within strict deadlines leading developers to deliberately or inadvertently serve “not quite right code” compromising software quality and maintainability. This non-ideal state of software is ...

Domain-specific languages (DSL) are programming or modeling languages devoted to a given application domain. There are many tools used to support the implementation of a DSL, making hard the decision-making process for one or another. In this ...

Containerization is a technique used to encapsulate a software system and its dependencies into one isolated package, which is called a container. The goal of these containers is to deploy or replicate a software system on various platforms and ...