arXiv subjects

Maximilian Capraro

Publications and source records attributed to Maximilian Capraro.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Bursts and Triggers: Socially-Driven Activity in Open-Source Co-Editing Networks

The long-term sustainability of Open Source Software (OSS) communities depends on the activity of their developers, yet the social mechanisms driving this collective behavior remain poorly understood. Analyzing commit histories across 51 major OSS communities, we find that developer contributions are strongly "bursty" in time. To test whether this burstiness reflects social responsiveness rather than individual habit alone, we model developer interactions as temporal co-editing networks and introduce a method to detect activity triggers, episodes in which one developer editing another's code is followed by an unusually rapid response, and the cascades they form. Benchmarking these against a null model that destroys the temporal ordering of co-edits while preserving each developer's activity rate, we find statistically significant cascades in 28 of 51 projects (55%) under our default configuration, though prevalence ranges from 24% to 82% across detection thresholds. Whether a project exhibits significant cascades is governed primarily by its scale rather than governance or commit concentration. Finally, as a secondary application, we test whether these signals inform developer churn: features capturing the recent (in)activity of a developer's collaborators add some predictive value, but a developer's own inactivity dominates, propagation over the co-editing graph adds little, and simple models match graph neural networks. Our results characterize developer responsiveness as a measurable component of collective OSS dynamics.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Towards a Software Architecture Description for Tax Compliance

The internal reuse of software components owned by organizational units in different countries constitutes an implicit form of licensing that may be taxable under international regulations, making tax authorities an often overlooked stakeholder in software architecture. This study assesses to what extent a deliberately minimal software architecture description can make implicit cross-border licensing visible and interpretable for tax experts. We define a deliberately minimal architecture viewpoint based on components, dependencies, ownership, and jurisdiction, and construct a view for a large-scale industrial microservice software system comprising 2,518 components and 16,533 dependencies. The resulting architecture description is evaluated in a judgment study with four experienced tax auditors and tax advisors using semi-structured interviews. The results show that the software architecture description provides a structured, evidence-based starting point for identifying cross-border reuse and supports tax audit discussions. However, experts consistently report limitations, including mismatches between software engineering and legal notions of ownership, unclear jurisdictional assignments, and the perceived risk of interpreting dependency counts as indicators of economic value. These limitations persist despite detailed architectural data. We conclude that software architecture descriptions can expose structurally relevant reuse relationships but cannot, on their own, support the legally meaningful interpretations required for tax assessment, indicating a fundamental mismatch between architectural abstractions and taxation concepts.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Taxing Collaborative Software Engineering

The engineering of complex software systems is often the result of a highly collaborative effort. However, collaboration within a multinational enterprise has an overlooked legal implication when developers collaborate across national borders: It is taxable. In this article, we discuss the unsolved problem of taxing collaborative software engineering across borders. We (1) introduce the reader to the basic principle of international taxation, (2) identify three main challenges for taxing collaborative software engineering making it a software engineering problem, and (3) estimate the industrial significance of cross-border collaboration in modern software engineering by measuring cross-border code reviews at a multinational software company.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

A Replication Study on Measuring the Growth of Open Source

Context: Over the last decades, open-source software has pervaded the software industry and has become one of the key pillars in software engineering. The incomparable growth of open source reflected that pervasion: Prior work described open source as a whole to be growing linearly, polynomially, or even exponentially. Objective: In this study, we explore the long-term growth of open source and corroborating previous findings by replicating previous studies on measuring the growth of open source projects. Method: We replicate four existing measurements on the growth of open source on a sample of 172,833 open-source projects using Open Hub as the measurement system: We analyzed lines of code, commits, new projects, and the number of open-source contributors over the last 30 years in the known open-source universe. Results: We found growth of open source to be exhausted: After an initial exponential growth, all measurements show a monotonic downwards trend since its peak in 2013. None of the existing growth models could stand the test of time. Conclusion: Our results raise more questions on the growth of open source and the representativeness of Open Hub as a proxy for describing open source. We discuss multiple interpretations for our observations and encourage further research using alternative data sets.

cs.SE↗