Software Engineering

When a change introduces a bug into a large software repository, there is often a delay between when the change is committed and when bug is detected. This is true even when the bug causes an existing test to fail! These delays are caused by resource constraints which prevent the organization from running all of the tests on every change. Due to the delay, a Continuous Integration system needs...

Understanding what affects software developer productivity can help organizations choose wise investments in their technical and social environment. But the research literature either focuses on what correlates with developer productivity in realistic settings or focuses on what causes developer productivity in highly constrained settings. In this paper, we bridge the gap by studying software...

Modern software development requires developers to find and effectively utilize new APIs and their documentation, but documentation has many well-known issues. Despite this, developers eventually overcome these issues but have no way of sharing what they learned. We investigate sharing this documentation-specific information through annotations, which have advantages over developer forums as...

In this paper, we show that the unsoundness discovered by Amin and Tate (2016) in Java’s wildcards is avoidable, even in the absence of a nullness-aware type system. The key insight of this paper is that soundness in type systems that implicitly introduce existential types through subtyping hinges on still making sure there are suitable witness types when introducing existentially quantified...