arXiv subjects

Raula Gaikovina Kula

Publications and source records attributed to Raula Gaikovina Kula.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

The Life and Death of Software Ecosystems

Software ecosystems have gained a lot of attention in recent times. Industry and developers gather around technologies and collaborate to their advancement; when the boundaries of such an effort go beyond certain amount of projects, we are witnessing the appearance of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) ecosystems. In this chapter, we explore two aspects that contribute to a healthy ecosystem, related to the attraction (and detraction) and the death of ecosystems. To function and survive, ecosystems need to attract people, get them on-boarded and retain them. In Section One we explore possibilities with provocative research questions for attracting and detracting contributors (and users): the lifeblood of FLOSS ecosystems. Then in the Section Two, we focus on the death of systems, exploring some presumed to be dead systems and their state in the afterlife.

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arXiv2023

18 Million Links in Commit Messages: Purpose, Evolution, and Decay

Commit messages contain diverse and valuable types of knowledge in all aspects of software maintenance and evolution. Links are an example of such knowledge. Previous work on "9.6 million links in source code comments" showed that links are prone to decay, become outdated, and lack bidirectional traceability. We conducted a large-scale study of 18,201,165 links from commits in 23,110 GitHub repositories to investigate whether they suffer the same fate. Results show that referencing external resources is prevalent and that the most frequent domains other than github.com are the external domains of Stack Overflow and Google Code. Similarly, links serve as source code context to commit messages, with inaccessible links being frequent. Although repeatedly referencing links is rare (4%), 14% of links that are prone to evolve become unavailable over time; e.g., tutorials or articles and software homepages become unavailable over time. Furthermore, we find that 70% of the distinct links suffer from decay; the domains that occur the most frequently are related to Subversion repositories. We summarize that links in commits share the same fate as links in code, opening up avenues for future work.

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arXiv2023

Meta-Maintanance for Dockerfiles: Are We There Yet?

Docker allows for the packaging of applications and dependencies, and its instructions are described in Dockerfiles. Nowadays, version pinning is recommended to avoid unexpected changes in the latest version of a package. However, version pinning in Dockerfiles is not yet fully realized (only 17k of the 141k Dockerfiles we analyzed), because of the difficulties caused by version pinning. To maintain Dockerfiles with version-pinned packages, it is important to update package versions, not only for improved functionality, but also for software supply chain security, as packages are changed to address vulnerabilities and bug fixes. However, when updating multiple version-pinned packages, it is necessary to understand the dependencies between packages and ensure version compatibility, which is not easy. To address this issue, we explore the applicability of the meta-maintenance approach, which aims to distribute the successful updates in a part of a group that independently maintains a common artifact. We conduct an exploratory analysis of 7,914 repositories on GitHub that hold Dockerfiles, which retrieve packages on GitHub by URLs. There were 385 repository groups with the same multiple package combinations, and 208 groups had Dockerfiles with newer version combinations compared to others, which are considered meta-maintenance applicable. Our findings support the potential of meta-maintenance for updating multiple version-pinned packages and also reveal future challenges.

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arXiv2023

We Live in a Society: Motivators for Contributions in an OSS Ecosystem

Due to the increasing number of attacks targeting open source library ecosystems, assisting maintainers has become a top priority. This is especially important since maintainers are usually overworked. Although the motivation of Open Source developers has been widely studied, the extent to which maintainers assist libraries that they depend on is unknown. Surveying NPM developers, our early results indicate a difference in motivation between maintaining their own library (i.e., more person driven), as opposed to professional factors (i.e., focus on skills and expertise) when contributing to the software ecosystem. Finally, our thematic analysis shows different motivations and barriers developers face when contributing to the ecosystem. These results show that developers have different motivations and barriers depending on the role they play when making contributions to the ecosystem.

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arXiv2023

Understanding the Role of Images on Stack Overflow

Images are increasingly being shared by software developers in diverse channels including question-and-answer forums like Stack Overflow. Although prior work has pointed out that these images are meaningful and provide complementary information compared to their associated text, how images are used to support questions is empirically unknown. To address this knowledge gap, in this paper we specifically conduct an empirical study to investigate (I) the characteristics of images, (II) the extent to which images are used in different question types, and (III) the role of images on receiving answers. Our results first show that user interface is the most common image content and undesired output is the most frequent purpose for sharing images. Moreover, these images essentially facilitate the understanding of 68% of sampled questions. Second, we find that discrepancy questions are more relatively frequent compared to those without images, but there are no significant differences observed in description length in all types of questions. Third, the quantitative results statistically validate that questions with images are more likely to receive accepted answers, but do not speed up the time to receive answers. Our work demonstrates the crucial role that images play by approaching the topic from a new angle and lays the foundation for future opportunities to use images to assist in tasks like generating questions and identifying question-relatedness.

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arXiv2023

Intertwining Communities: Exploring Libraries that Cross Software Ecosystems

Using libraries in applications has helped developers reduce the costs of reinventing already existing code. However, an increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies and search for similar libraries implemented in the new technology. To assist with searching for these replacement libraries, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple ecosystems. Our goal is to explore the extent to which these libraries are intertwined between ecosystems. We perform a large-scale empirical study of 1.1 million libraries from five different software ecosystems, i.e., PyPI, CRAN, Maven, RubyGems, and NPM, to identify 4,146 GitHub repositories. As a starting point, insights from the study raise implications for library maintainers, users, contributors, and researchers into understanding how these different ecosystems are becoming more intertwined with each other.

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arXiv2022

Visualizing Contributor Code Competency for PyPI Libraries: Preliminary Results

Python is known to be used by beginners to professional programmers. Python provides functionality to its community of users through PyPI libraries, which allows developers to reuse functionalities to an application. However, it is unknown the extent to which these PyPI libraries require proficient code in their implementation. We conjecture that PyPI contributors may decide to implement more advanced Pythonic code, or stick with more basic Python code. Are complex codes only committed by few contributors, or only to specific files? The new idea in this paper is to confirm who and where complex code is implemented. Hence, we present a visualization to show the relationship between proficient code, contributors, and files. Analyzing four PyPI projects, we are able to explore which files contain more elegant code, and which contributors committed to these files. Our results show that most files contain more basic competency files, and that not every contributor contributes competent code. We show how~our visualization is able to summarize such information, and opens up different possibilities for understanding how to make elegant contributions.

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arXiv2022

An Exploration of Cross-Patch Collaborations via Patch Linkage in OpenStack

Contemporary development projects benefit from code review as it improves the quality of a project. Large ecosystems of inter-dependent projects like OpenStack generate a large number of reviews, which poses new challenges for collaboration (improving patches, fixing defects). Review tools allow developers to link between patches, to indicate patch dependency, competing solutions, or provide broader context. We hypothesize that such patch linkage may also simulate cross-collaboration. With a case study of OpenStack, we take a first step to explore collaborations that occur after a patch linkage was posted between two patches (i.e., cross-patch collaboration). Our empirical results show that although patch linkage that requests collaboration is relatively less prevalent, the probability of collaboration is relatively higher. Interestingly, the results also show that collaborative contributions via patch linkage are non-trivial, i.e, contributions can affect the review outcome (such as voting) or even improve the patch (i.e., revising). This work opens up future directions to understand barriers and opportunities related to this new kind of collaboration, that assists with code review and development tasks in large ecosystems.

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arXiv2022

An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of PMs with various features. While our recent study indicates that package management features of PM are related to end-user experiences, it is unclear what those issues are and what information is required to resolve them. In this paper, we have investigated PM issues faced by end-users through an empirical study of content on Stack Overflow (SO). We carried out a qualitative analysis of 1,131 questions and their accepted answer posts for three popular PMs (i.e., Maven, npm, and NuGet) to identify issue types, underlying causes, and their resolutions. Our results confirm that end-users struggle with PM tool usage (approximately 64-72%). We observe that most issues are raised by end-users due to lack of instructions and errors messages from PM tools. In terms of issue resolution, we find that external link sharing is the most common practice to resolve PM issues. Additionally, we observe that links pointing to useful resources (i.e., official documentation websites, tutorials, etc.) are most frequently shared, indicating the potential for tool support and the ability to provide relevant information for PM end-users.

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arXiv2022

An Empirical Evaluation of Competitive Programming AI: A Case Study of AlphaCode

AlphaCode is a code generation system for assisting software developers in solving competitive programming problems using natural language problem descriptions. Despite the advantages of the code generating system, the open source community expressed concerns about practicality and data licensing. However, there is no research investigating generated codes in terms of code clone and performance. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to find code similarities and performance differences between AlphaCode-generated codes and human codes. The results show that (i) the generated codes from AlphaCode are similar to human codes (i.e., the average maximum similarity score is 0.56) and (ii) the generated code performs on par with or worse than the human code in terms of execution time and memory usage. Moreover, AlphaCode tends to generate more similar codes to humans for low-difficulty problems (i.e., four cases have the exact same codes). It also employs excessive nested loops and unnecessary variable declarations for high-difficulty problems, which cause low performance regarding our manual investigation. The replication package is available at https:/doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6820681

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arXiv2022

Intertwining Ecosystems: A Large Scale Empirical Study of Libraries that Cross Software Ecosystems

An increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies. To assist these developers, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple technologies, i.e., a cross-ecosystem library. Our goal is to explore the extent to which these cross-ecosystem libraries are intertwined between ecosystems. We perform a large-scale empirical study of 1.1 million libraries from five different software ecosystems, i.e., PyPI for Python, CRAN for R, Maven for Java, RubyGems for Ruby, and NPM for JavaScript to identify 4,146 GitHub projects that release libraries to these five ecosystems. Analyzing their contributions, we first find that a significant majority (median of 37.5%) of contributors of these cross-ecosystem libraries come from a single ecosystem, while also receiving a significant portion of contributions (median of 24.06%) from outside their target ecosystems. We also find that a cross-ecosystem library is written using multiple programming languages. Specifically, three (i.e., PyPI, CRAN, RubyGems) out of the five ecosystems has the majority of source code is written using languages not specific to that ecosystem. As ecosystems become intertwined, this opens up new avenues for research, such as whether or not cross-ecosystem libraries will solve the search for replacement libraries, or how these libraries fit within each ecosystem just to name a few.

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arXiv2022

Bug-Fix Variants: Visualizing Unique Source Code Changes across GitHub Forks

Forking is a common practice for developers when building upon on already existing projects. These forks create variants, which have a common code base but then evolve the code in different directions, which is specific to that forked project requirements. An interesting side-effect of having multiple forks is the ability to select between different evolution directions of the code which is based on developers fixing bugs in the code base. However, the key issue that this decentralized form of information is difficult to analyze. In this study, we propose a visualization to analyze active changes in fork repositories that have not been merged back to the original project. Our visualization shows code commit activities in multiple forks with highlight on bug fix commits in the history of forks. While the commit activity of each repository is visualized similarly to the code frequency view of GitHub, our view shows only commits unique to fork repositories. To illustrate the effectiveness of our visualization, we have applied our view to two use cases: identifying forks from a repository no longer maintained, and identifying a bug fix among forks. In the first case, we identify a fork of a suspended project named Obfuscator-LLVM. Our view shows the original repository and its most active fork that continue the development on the top. In the second case, we identify a bug fix in a fork of Clipy project. Our view shows that the most active fork has its own bug fixes; we could easily identify a patch for the bug highlighted in the view. As a new ideas paper, we then present our outline of three research questions to spark real world use-cases and goals for our visualization has the potential to uncover. A prototype of our visualization is available at \textcolor{blue}{\url{https://naist-se.github.io/vissoft2022/}

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arXiv2022

In War and Peace: The Impact of World Politics on Software Ecosystems

Reliance on third-party libraries is now commonplace in contemporary software engineering. Being open source in nature, these libraries should advocate for a world where the freedoms and opportunities of open source software can be enjoyed by all. Yet, there is a growing concern related to maintainers using their influence to make political stances (i.e., referred to as protestware). In this paper, we reflect on the impact of world politics on software ecosystems, especially in the context of the ongoing War in Ukraine. We show three cases where world politics has had an impact on a software ecosystem, and how these incidents may result in either benign or malignant consequences. We further point to specific opportunities for research, and conclude with a research agenda with ten research questions to guide future research directions.

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arXiv2022

Understanding the Role of External Pull Requests in the NPM Ecosystem

The risk to using third-party libraries in a software application is that much needed maintenance is solely carried out by library maintainers. These libraries may rely on a core team of maintainers (who might be a single maintainer that is unpaid and overworked) to serve a massive client user-base. On the other hand, being open source has the benefit of receiving contributions (in the form of External PRs) to help fix bugs and add new features. In this paper, we investigate the role by which External PRs (contributions from outside the core team of maintainers) contribute to a library. Through a preliminary analysis, we find that External PRs are prevalent, and just as likely to be accepted as maintainer PRs. We find that 26.75% of External PRs submitted fix existing issues. Moreover, fixes also belong to labels such as breaking changes, urgent, and on-hold. Differently from Internal PRs, External PRs cover documentation changes (44 out of 384 PRs), while not having as much refactoring (34 out of 384 PRs). On the other hand, External PRs also cover new features (380 out of 384 PRs) and bugs (120 out of 384). Our results lay the groundwork for understanding how maintainers decide which external contributions they select to evolve their libraries and what role they play in reducing the workload.

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arXiv2022

Giving Back: Contributions Congruent to Library Dependency Changes in a Software Ecosystem

Popular adoption of third-party libraries for contemporary software development has led to the creation of large inter-dependency networks, where sustainability issues of a single library can have widespread network effects. Maintainers of these libraries are often overworked, relying on the contributions of volunteers to sustain these libraries. In this work, we measure contributions that are aligned with dependency changes, to understand where they come from (i.e., non-maintainer, client maintainer, library maintainer, and library and client maintainer), analyze whether they contribute to library dormancy (i.e., a lack of activity), and investigate the similarities between these contributions and developers' typical contributions. Hence, we leverage socio-technical techniques to measure the dependency-contribution congruence (DC congruence), i.e., the degree to which contributions align with dependencies. We conduct a large-scale empirical study to measure the DC congruence for the NPM ecosystem using 1.7 million issues, 970 thousand pull requests (PR), and over 5.3 million commits belonging to 107,242 NPM packages. At the ecosystem level, we pinpoint in time peaks of congruence with dependency changes (i.e., 16% DC congruence score). Surprisingly, these contributions came from the ecosystem itself (i.e., non-maintainers of either client and library). At the project level, we find that DC congruence shares a statistically significant relationship with the likelihood of a package becoming dormant. Finally, by comparing source code of contributions, we find that congruent contributions are statistically different to typical contributions. Our work has implications to encourage and sustain contributions, especially to support library maintainers that require dependency changes.

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arXiv2022

On the Use of Refactoring in Security Vulnerability Fixes: An Exploratory Study on Maven Libraries

Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the community developed a list of software and hardware weakness known as Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) to assess vulnerabilities. Prior work has revealed that maintenance activities such as refactoring code potentially correlate with security-related aspects in the source code. In this work, we explore the relationship between refactoring and security by analyzing refactoring actions performed jointly with vulnerability fixes in practice. We conducted a case study to analyze 143 maven libraries in which 351 known vulnerabilities had been detected and fixed. Surprisingly, our exploratory results show that developers incorporate refactoring operations in their fixes, with 31.9% (112 out of 351) of the vulnerabilities paired with refactoring actions. We envision this short paper to open up potential new directions to motivate automated tool support, allowing developers to deliver fixes faster, while maintaining their code.

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arXiv2022

Newcomer OSS-Candidates: Characterizing Contributions of Novice Developers to GitHub

The ability of an Open Source Software (OSS) project to attract, onboard, and retain any newcomer is vital to its livelihood. Although, evidence suggests an upsurge in novice developers joining social coding platforms (such as GitHub), the extent to which their activities result in a OSS contribution is unknown. Henceforth, we execute the protocols of a registered report to study activities of a "Newcomer OSS-Candidate", who is a novice developer that is new to that social coding platform, and has the intention to later onboard an OSS project. Using GitHub as a case platform, we analyze 171 identified Newcomer OSS-Candidates to characterize their contribution activities. Results show that Newcomer OSS-Candidates are likely to target software based repositories (i.e., 66%), and their first contributions are mainly associated with development (commits) and maintenance (PRs). Newcomer OSS-Candidates are less likely to practice social coding, but eventually end up onboarding (i.e., 30% quantitative, 70% follow-up survey) an OSS project. Furthermore, they cite finding a way to start as the most challenging barrier to contribute. Our work reveals insights on how newcomers to social coding platforms are potential sources of OSS contributions.

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arXiv2022

pycefr: Python Competency Level through Code Analysis

Python is known to be a versatile language, well suited both for beginners and advanced users. Some elements of the language are easier to understand than others: some are found in any kind of code, while some others are used only by experienced programmers. The use of these elements lead to different ways to code, depending on the experience with the language and the knowledge of its elements, the general programming competence and programming skills, etc. In this paper, we present pycefr, a tool that detects the use of the different elements of the Python language, effectively measuring the level of Python proficiency required to comprehend and deal with a fragment of Python code. Following the well-known Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), widely used for natural languages, pycefr categorizes Python code in six levels, depending on the proficiency required to create and understand it. We also discuss different use cases for pycefr: identifying code snippets that can be understood by developers with a certain proficiency, labeling code examples in online resources such as Stackoverflow and GitHub to suit them to a certain level of competency, helping in the onboarding process of new developers in Open Source Software projects, etc. A video shows availability and usage of the tool: https://tinyurl.com/ypdt3fwe.

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