Merge conflicts have long plagued software development. With larger and more dispersed teams comes greater risk of developers working on the same code at the same time. While merge conflicts are known to be painful, their exact impact on software is still largely unknown. Are merge conflicts an isolated problem,...
Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) have seen an increase in popularity relative to traditional Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCS). Yet we know little on whether developers are benefitting from the extra power of DVCS. Without such knowledge, researchers, developers, tool builders, and team managers are in the danger of making...
Our confidence in software systems depends on our confidence in the exhaustiveness of our testing. As software systems get more complex, the task of exhaustive testing becomes more complex and even infeasible in some cases. In order to build less error prone systems, we therefore need to not only focus...
Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) have seen an increase in popularity relative to traditional Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCS). Yet we know little on whether VCS tools meet the needs of software developers when managing software change or whether developers are benefitting from the extra power of DVCS. Without such...
Distributed version control allows developers to manage software evolution among distributed development teams. But it does not eliminate all consistency and concurrency issues, and instead introduces additional complexity when merging code. And resolving merge conflicts is nontrivial when automated merging fails. In such cases, developers are forced to inspect the...
When contributing to a software system, developers need to understand the rationale for previous design decisions so that they can adhere to the system’s design. Not doing so can lead to erosion of the overall design quality of the system. However, discussions embedded in a large volume of communication on...
Software history and version control systems (VCS) are an important source of information for developers. This entails the need for a principled understanding of developers’ information seeking in VCS, both for improving existing tools as well as understanding requirements for new tools. However, it is only recently that researchers have...
Software systems are becoming an essential part of the lives of both individuals and organizations, and as a consequence, these systems are getting bigger and more complex. Because of this, the tasks of maintaining the quality in these complex software systems are becoming increasingly difficult. Furthermore, these systems are subject...
End-user programming has become widespread. The increasing size of this population and the prevalence of barriers that they face has sparked the development of approaches that promote end-user programing by helping them overcome barriers and teaching them programming. Despite the fact that these approaches have done well in achieving those...
Enabled by a rich ecosystem of Machine Learning (ML) libraries, programming using learned models, i.e., Software-2.0, has gained substantial adoption. However, we do not know what challenges developers encounter when they use ML libraries. With this knowledge gap, researchers miss opportunities to contribute to new research directions, tool builders do...