Bram Adams

Queen's University | QueensU

Software applications that run on a blockchain platform are known as DApps. DApps are built using smart contracts, which are immutable after deployment. Just like any real-world software system, DApps need to receive new features and bug fixes over time in order to remain useful and secure. However, Ethereum lacks native solutions for post-deployme...

Despite their proliferation, growing sustainable software ecosystems (SECOs) remains a substantial challenge. One approach to mitigate this challenge is by collecting and integrating feedback from distributors (distros) and end-users of the SECO releases into future SECO releases, tools, or policies. This paper performs a socio-technical analysis o...

Machine Learning (ML) academic publications commonly provide open-source implementations on GitHub, allowing their audience to replicate, validate, or even extend the ML algorithms, data sets and metadata. However, thus far little is known about the degree of collaboration activity happening on such ML research repositories, in particular regarding...

Technical collaboration between multiple contributors is a natural phenomenon in distributed open source software development projects. Macro-collaboration, where each code commit is attributed to a single collaborator, has been extensively studied in the research literature. This is much less the case for so-called micro-collaboration practices, i...

While numerous open source projects operate on their own, others decide to join well-established foundations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Eclipse Foundation. Although many studies have investigated the motivations of individuals and companies contributing to open source, it remains unknown why projects decide to join softwar...

Although issues of open source software are created to discuss and solve technical problems, conversations can become heated, with discussants getting angry and/or agitated for a variety of reasons, such as poor suggestions or violation of community conventions. To prevent and mitigate discussions from getting heated, tools like GitHub have introdu...

Machine Learning (ML) research publications commonly provide open-source implementations on GitHub, allowing their audience to replicate, validate, or even extend machine learning algorithms, data sets, and metadata. However, thus far little is known about the degree of collaboration activity happening on such ML research repositories, in particula...

Dependency management bots are increasingly being used to support the software development process, for example to automatically update a dependency when a new version is available. Yet, human intervention is often required to either accept or reject any action or recommendation the bot creates. In this paper, our objective is to study the extent t...

In the last few decades, companies are interested to adopt an online automated recruitment process in an international recruitment environment. The problem is that the recruitment of employees through the manual procedure is a time and money consuming process. As a result, processing a significant number of applications through conventional methods...

Context In recent years, crowd-based content in the form of instructional screencast videos has gained popularity among software engineers. For organizations to remain competitive in attracting and retaining their workforce, they must accommodate the use of such crowd-based documentation content. Objective We conduct a user survey to gain insights...

Reports of poor work well-being and fluctuating productivity in software engineering have been reported in both academic and popular sources. Understanding and predicting these issues through repository analysis might help manage software developers’ well-being. Our objective is to link data from software repositories, that is commit activity, comm...

Code review is an important quality assurance activity for software development. Code review discussions among developers and maintainers can be heated and sometimes involve personal attacks and unnecessary disrespectful comments, demonstrating, therefore, incivility. Although incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from...

Code review is an important quality assurance activity for software development. Code review discussions among developers and maintainers can be heated and sometimes involve personal attacks and unnecessary disrespectful comments, demonstrating, therefore, incivility. Although incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from...

Despite the growing success of open-source software ecosystems (SECOs), their sustainability depends on the recruitment and involvement of ever-larger contributors. As such, onboarding, i.e., the socio-technical adaptation of new contributors to a SECO, forms a significant aspect of a SECO's growth that requires substantial resources. Unfortunately...

Reports of poor work well-being and fluctuating productivity in software engineering have been reported in both academic and popular sources. Understanding and predicting these issues through repository analysis might help manage software developers' well-being. Our objective is to link data from software repositories, that is commit activity, comm...

Previous studies have investigated a wide range of factors potentially explaining software build breakages, focusing primarily on build-triggering code changes or previous CI outcomes. However, code quality factors such as the presence of code/test smells have not been yet evaluated in the context of CI, even though such factors have been linked to...

Crowd-based multimedia documents such as screencasts have emerged as a source for documenting requirements, the workflow and implementation issues of open source and agile software projects. For example, users can show and narrate how they manipulate an application’s GUI to perform a certain functionality, or a bug reporter could visually explain h...

The role of machine learning frameworks in software applications has exploded in recent years. Similar to non-machine learning frameworks, those frameworks need to evolve to incorporate new features, optimizations, etc., yet their evolution is impacted by the interdisciplinary development teams needed to develop them: scientists and developers. One...

Nowadays, developers are often using multiple programming languages to exploit the advantages of each language and to reuse code. However, dependency analysis across multi-language is more challenging compared to mono-language systems. In this paper, we introduce two approaches for multi-language dependency analysis: S-MLDA (Static Multi-language D...

The coordination of robot swarms -- large decentralized teams of robots— generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments where robot motion, unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures add t...

Interconnected devices and mobile multi-robot systems are increasingly present in many real-life scenarios. To be effective, these systems need to collect large amounts of data from their environment, and often these data need to be aggregated, shared, and distributed. Many multi-robot systems are designed to share state information and commands, b...

The users or deployment engineers of a software system can adapt such a system to a wide range of deployment and usage scenarios by changing the value of configuration options, for example by disabling unnecessary features, tweaking performance-related parameters or specifying GUI preferences. However, the literature agrees that the flexibility of...

Software developers insert logging statements in their source code to collect important runtime information of software systems. In practice, logging appropriately is a challenge for developers. Prior studies aimed to improve logging by proactively inserting logging statements in certain code snippets or by learning where to log from existing loggi...

Continuous Integration (CI) is a cornerstone of modern quality assurance, providing on-demand builds (compilation and tests) of code changes or software releases. Yet the many existing CI systems do not help developers in interpreting build results, in particular when facing build inflation. Build inflation arises when each code change has to be bu...

The coordination of robot swarms-large decentralized teams of robots-generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments. Unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures all contribute to the comple...

The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments. Unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures all contribute to the co...

The blame feature of version control systems is widely used—both by practitioners and researchers—to determine who has last modified a given line of code, and the commit where this contribution was made. The main disadvantage of blame is that, when a line is modified several times, it only shows the last commit that modified it—occluding previous c...

The R programming language has an active community of both users and developers, which maintain mailing lists to communicate. Given their differences in training and stability, the effects of communication tone on responding may differ across these two groups. We thus compared the prevalence and characteristics of different tones in the R-help user...

Connectivity maintenance plays a key role in achieving a desired global behavior among a swarm of robots. However, connectivity maintenance in realistic environments is hampered by lack of computation resources, low communication bandwidth, robot failures, and unstable links. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized connectivity-preserving a...

Interconnected devices and mobile multi-robot systems are increasingly present in many real-life scenarios. To be effective, these systems need to collect large amounts of data from their environment, and often these data need to be aggregated, shared, and distributed. Many multi-robot systems are designed to share state information and commands, b...

Modern software applications are adapted to different situations (e.g., memory limits, enabling/disabling features) by only changing few configuration option values without any source code modifications. According to several studies, this flexibility is expensive. Indeed, configuration errors represent one of the largest percentage of software erro...

Background: The experience sampling method studies everyday experiences of humans in natural environments. In psychology it has been used to study the relationships between work well-being and productivity. To our best knowledge, daily experience sampling has not been previously used in software engineering. Aims: Our aim is to identify links betwe...

Crowd-based multi-media documents such as screencasts have emerged as a source for documenting requirements of agile software projects. For example, screencasts can describe buggy scenarios of a software product, or present new features in an upcoming release. Unfortunately, the binary format of videos makes traceabil-ity between the video content...

Crowd-based multi-media documents such as screencasts have emerged as a source for documenting requirements of agile software projects. For example, screencasts can describe buggy scenarios of a software product, or present new features in an upcoming release. Unfortunately, the binary format of videos makes traceability between the video content a...

Abnormal working hours can reduce work health, general well-being, and productivity, independent from a profession. To inform future approaches for automatic stress and overload detection, this paper establishes empirically collected measures of the work patterns of software engineers. To this aim, we perform the first large-scale study of software...

Abnormal working hours can reduce work health, general well-being, and productivity, independent from a profession. To inform future approaches for automatic stress and overload detection, this paper establishes empirically collected measures of the work patterns of software engineers. To this aim, we perform the first large-scale study of software...

Software development—just like any other human collaboration—inevitably evokes emotions like joy or sadness, which are known to affect the group dynamics within a team. Today, little is known about those individual emotions and whether they can be discerned at all in the development artifacts produced during a project. This paper analyzes (a) wheth...

Software developers rely on a build system to compile their source code changes and produce deliverables for testing and deployment. Since the full build of large software systems can take hours, the incremental build is a cornerstone of modern build systems. Incremental builds should only recompile deliverables whose dependencies have been changed...

Configuration frameworks are routinely used in software systems to change application behavior without recom-pilation. Selecting a suitable configuration framework among the vast variety of existing choices is a crucial decision for developers , as it can impact project reliability and its maintenance profile. In this paper, we analyze almost 2,000...

Since more than 90% of mobile apps today are free-to-download, advertisements within apps are one of the key business models to generate revenue. Advertisements are served through the embedding of specialized code, i.e., ad libraries. Unlike other types of libraries, developers cannot ignore new versions of the current ad libraries or new ad librar...

Unlike products on Amazon, mobile apps are continuously evolving with new versions of apps in the app store replacing the old versions at a rapid pace. Nevertheless, many app stores still use the Amazon-style rating system for their hosted apps, where every rating assigned to an app over its entire life time is aggregated into one rating that is di...

Today’s web applications are deployed on powerful software stacks such as MEAN (JavaScript) or LAMP (PHP), which consist of multiple layers such as an operating system, web server, database, execution engine and application framework, each of which provide resources to the layer just above it. These powerful software stacks unfortunately are plague...

During the past years, overload at work leading to psychological diseases, such as burnouts, have drawn more public attention. This paper is a preliminary step toward an analysis of the work patterns and possible indicators of overload and time pressure on software developers with mining software repositories approach. We explore the working patter...

Given the increasing competition in mobile-app ecosystems, improving the user experience has become a major goal for app vendors. App Store 2.0 will exploit crowdsourced information about apps, devices, and users to increase the overall quality of the delivered mobile apps. App Store 2.0 generates different kinds of actionable feedback from the cro...

Continuous Integration (CI) is a cornerstone of modern quality assurance, providing on-demand builds (compilation and tests) of code changes or software releases. Despite the myriad of CI tools and frameworks, the basic activity of interpreting build results is not straightforward, due to not only the number of builds being performed but also, and...

Open source projects rely on collaboration of members from all around the world using web technologies like GitHub and Gerrit. This mixture of people with a wide range of backgrounds including minorities like women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities may increase the risk of offensive and destroying behaviours in the community, potenti...

Flight simulators are systems composed of numerous off-the-shelf components that allow pilots and maintenance crew to prepare for common and emergency flight procedures for a given aircraft model. A simulator must follow severe safety specifications to guarantee correct behaviour and requires an extensive series of prolonged manual tests to identif...

Flight simulators are systems composed of numerous off-the-shelf components that allow pilots and maintenance crew to prepare for common and emergency flight procedures for a given aircraft model. A simulator must follow severe safety specifications to guarantee correct behaviour and requires an extensive series of prolonged manual tests to identif...

Frameworks are widely used in modern software development to reduce development costs. They are accessed through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which specify the contracts with client programs. When frameworks evolve, API backward-compatibility cannot always be guaranteed and client programs must upgrade to use the new releases. B...

Several techniques are used by requirements engineering practitioners to address difficult problems such as specifying precise requirements while using inherently ambiguous natural language text and ensuring the consistency of requirements. Often, these problems are addressed by building processes/tools that combine multiple techniques where the ou...

Test case prioritization is an important testing activity, in practice, specially for large scale systems. The goal is to rank the existing test cases in a way that they detect faults as soon as possible, so that any partial execution of the test suite detects the maximum number of defects for the given budget. Test prioritization becomes even more...

Issue tracking systems store valuable data for testing hypotheses concerning maintenance, building statistical prediction models and (recently) investigating developer affectiveness. For the latter, issue tracking systems can be mined to explore developers emotions, sentiments and politeness---affects for short. However, research on affect detectio...

Similar to other industries, the software engineering domain is plagued by psychological diseases such as burnout, which lead developers to lose interest, exhibit lower activity and/or feel powerless. Prevention is essential for such diseases, which in turn requires early identification of symptoms. The emotional dimensions of Valence, Arousal and...

We created detailed profiles of the energy consumed by common operations done on Java List, Map, and Set abstractions. The results show that the alternative data types for these abstractions differ significantly in terms of energy consumption depending on the operations. For example, an ArrayList consumes less energy than a LinkedList if items are...

Despite the globalization of software development, relevant documentation of a project, such as requirements and design documents, often still is missing, incomplete or outdated. However, parts of that documentation can be found outside the project, where it is fragmented across hundreds of textual web documents like blog posts, email messages and...

Continuous delivery and rapid releases have led to innovative techniques for integrating new features and bug fixes into a new release faster. To reduce the probability of integration conflicts, major software companies, including Google, Facebook and Netflix, use feature toggles to incrementally integrate and test new features instead of integrati...

The reputation of a mobile app vendor is crucial to survive amongst the ever increasing competition. However this reputation largely depends on the quality of the apps, both functional and non-functional. One major non-functional requirement of mobile apps is to guarantee smooth UI interactions, since choppy scrolling or navigation caused by perfor...

While the number of mobile apps published by app stores keeps on increasing, the quality of these apps varies widely. Unfortunately, for many apps, end-users continue experiencing bugs and crashes once installed on their mobile device. Crashes are annoying for end-users, but they definitely are for app developers who need to reproduce the crashes a...

The recent surge in interest in continuous delivery has opened up the job market for release and DevOps engineers. However, despite an increasing number of conferences and publications on continuous delivery, smaller companies and start-ups still have a hard time determining the core tasks their future release and DevOps engineers should be respons...

Few minutes after a web-based software release, the release team might encounter log traces showing the new system crashing, hanging, or having poor performance. This is the start of the most nerve-wrecking moments of a product's release cycle, i.e., should one run the risk of not doing anything and users losing precious data, or of prematurely eng...

Similar to other industries, the software engineering domain is plagued by psychological diseases such as burnout, which lead developers to lose interest, exhibit lower activity and/or feel powerless. Prevention is essential for such diseases, which in turn requires early identification of symptoms. The emotional dimensions of Valence, Arousal and...

Because more than 90 percent of mobile apps are free, advertising on them is a key revenue source for their developers. Advertisements are served on apps through embedded specialized code called ad libraries. Unlike with other types of libraries, app developers can't ignore new ad libraries or new versions of embedded ad libraries without risking r...

Nine rising stars in software engineering describe how software engineering research will evolve, highlighting emerging opportunities and groundbreaking solutions. They predict the rise of end-user programming, the monitoring of developers through neuroimaging and biometrics sensors, analysis of data from unstructured documents, the mining of mobil...

Large open and closed source organizations like Google, Facebook and Mozilla are migrating their products towards rapid releases. While this allows faster time-to-market and user feedback, it also implies less time for testing and bug fixing. Since initial research results indeed show that rapid releases fix proportionally less reported bugs than t...

Issue tracking systems store valuable data for testing hypotheses concerning maintenance, building statistical prediction models and recently investigating developers "affectiveness". In particular, the Jira Issue Tracking System is a proprietary tracking system that has gained a tremendous popularity in the last years and offers unique features li...

Traditionally, programmers have received a wide range of training on programming languages and methodologies, but rarely about software energy consumption. Yet, the popularity of mobile devices and cloud computing require increased awareness about software energy consumption. On a mobile device, computation is often limited by the battery life. Und...

Traditionally, programmers have received a wide range of training on programming languages and methodologies, but rarely about software energy consumption. Yet, the popularity of mobile devices and cloud computing require increased awareness about software energy consumption. On a mobile device, computation is often limited by the battery life. Und...

Software developers rely on a fast build system to incrementally compile their source code changes and produce modified deliverables for testing and deployment. Header files, which tend to trigger slow rebuild processes, are most problematic if they also change frequently during the development process, and hence, need to be rebuilt often. In this...

Human Affectiveness, i.e., The emotional state of a person, plays a crucial role in many domains where it can make or break a team's ability to produce successful products. Software development is a collaborative activity as well, yet there is little information on how affectiveness impacts software productivity. As a first measure of this impact,...