Semantically-enhanced topic recommendation systems for software projects

Software-related platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow, have enabled their users to collaboratively label software entities with a form of metadata called topics. Tagging software repositories with relevant topics can be exploited for facilitating various downstream tasks. For instance, a correct and complete set of topics assigned to a...

Pull Request Decisions Explained: An Empirical Overview

Context: The pull-based development model is widely used in open source projects, leading to the emergence of trends in distributed software development. One aspect that has garnered significant attention concerning pull request decisions is the identification of explanatory factors. Objective: This study builds on a decade of research on...

Bots for Pull Requests: The Good, the Bad, and the Promising

Software bots automate tasks within Open Source Software (OSS) projects’ pull requests and save reviewing time and effort (“the good”). However, their interactions can be disruptive and noisy and lead to information overload (“the bad”). To identify strategies to overcome such problems, we applied Design Fiction as a participatory method with 32...

Software Bots in Software Engineering: Benefits and Challenges

Software bots are becoming increasingly popular in software engineering (SE). In this tutorial, we define what a bot is and present several examples. We also discuss the many benefits bots provide to the SE community, including helping in development tasks (such as pull request review and integration) and onboarding newcomers to a project....

What drives cryptocurrency market dynamics?: Analysing external variable influence on cryptocurrency prices

Since the introduction of Blockchain technologies in Bitcoin (Nakamoto & Bitcoin, 2008), there has been over a decade of innovation and growth. The cryptocurrency markets have formed their own ecosystem and followings. On Wednesday 12 th May, 2021, cryptocurrencies reached their highest total market capitalisation yet, at $ 2.5 trillion ...

Method-Level Data in GitHub Pull Request Descriptions: Effects on Developers' Prioritization and Facilitation of Fixing Vulnerable Dependencies

Modern software development involves the usage of external third-party software projects as direct dependencies. Nonetheless, developers of a dependant project have no control over critical aspects such as development and testing of the dependency. This can put the reliant repositories at risk through vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by...

Understanding the Working Time of Developers in IT Companies in China and the United States

We identified three temporal patterns shown in commit activities among Chinese and American companies and found that Chinese businesses are more likely to follow long work hours than American ones. We also conducted a survey on the trends of, reasons for, and results of overtime work. Our study could provide references for developers to...

Relationship between Geographical Location and Evaluation of Developer Contributions in GitHub

Background: Open source software projects show gender bias suggesting that other demographic characteristics of developers, like geographical location, can negatively influence evaluation of contributions too. Aim: This study contributes to this emerging body of knowledge in software development by presenting a quantitative analysis of the...

Social Diversity and Growth Levels of Open Source Software Projects on GitHub

Background: Projects of all sizes and impact are leveraging the services of the social coding platform GitHub to collaborate. Since users' information and actions are recorded, GitHub has been mined for over 6 years now to investigate aspects of the collaborative open source software (OSS) development paradigm. Aim: In this research, we use...

BEPStore: The reverse App Store

FeedbackFruits is a company that offers an online learning solution to help innovate education. Their platform is used on a daily basis by teachers and students to improve their learning experience. When using the platform, the users often think of valuable feedback and new features they would like to see added. This report describes the process...

Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The Contributor’s Perspective

The pull-based development model is an emerging way of contributing to distributed software projects that is gaining enormous popularity within the open source software (OSS) world. Previous work has examined this model by focusing on projects and their owners-we complement it by examining the work practices of project contributors and the...

Analyzing the State of Static Analysis: A Large-Scale Evaluation in Open Source Software

The use of automatic static analysis has been a software engineering best practice for decades. However, we still do not know a lot about its use in real-world software projects: How prevalent is the use of Automated Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) such as FindBugs and JSHint? How do developers use these tools, and how does their use evolve over...

Octopull: Integrating Static Analysis with Code Reviews

Teams using modern day software engineering practices often incorporate code reviews as a quality assurance step in their development. These code reviews are intended to uncover software quality defects before code changes are incorporated into the project. Certain classes of these software quality defects can be detected by so-called static...

Using Github Profiles in Software Developer Recruitment and Hiring

Social coding platforms can provide initial understanding about the skills exhibited by the developers on these platforms. In contexts where candidates social profile information is useful for recruiting software developers, the information regarding the developers on these platforms can be leveraged by the recruiters with some software...

Automatically prioritizing pull requests

In previous work, we observed that in the pull-based development model integrators face challenges with regard to prioritizing work in the face of multiple concurrent pull requests. We present the design and initial implementation of a prototype pull request prioritisation tool called PRioritizer. PRioritizer works like a priority inbox for...

Prioritizing pull requests

Previous work showed that in the pull-based development model integrators face challenges with regard to prioritizing work in the face of multiple concurrent pull requests. We identified the manual prioritization heuristics applied by integrators and extracted features from these heuristics. The features are used to train a machine learning...

Combining source code and test coverage changes in pull requests

With the increasing popularity of open-source version control platforms like GitHub, developers get more feedback on the changes they make. A common tool in version control systems is the highlighted difference view of the source code. This enables reviewers to quickly view the changes made. A missing feature is comparison of the test coverage....