Automated program repair (APR) has been gaining ground with substantial effort devoted to the area, opening up many challenges and opportunities. One such challenge is that the state-of-the-art repair techniques often resort to incomplete specifications, e.g., test cases that witness buggy behavior, to generate repairs. In practice, bug-exposing test cases are often available when: (1) developers, at the same time of (or after) submitting bug fixes, create the tests to assure the correctness of the fixes, or (2) regression errors occur. The former case – a scenario commonly used for creating popular bug datasets – however, may not be suitable to assess how APR performs in the wild. Since developers already know where and how to fix the bugs, tests created in this case may encapsulate knowledge gained only after bugs are fixed. Thus, more effort is needed to create datasets for more realistically evaluating APR.We address this challenge by creating a dataset focusing on bugs identified via continuous integration (CI) failures – a special case of regression errors – wherein bugs happen when the program after being changed is re-executed on the existing test suite. We argue that CI failures, wherein bug-exposing tests are created before bug fixes and thus assume no prior knowledge of developers on the bugs to be involved, are more realistic for evaluating APR. Toward this end, we curated 102 CI failures from 40 popular real-world software on GitHub. We demonstrate various features and the usefulness of the dataset via an evaluation of five well-known APR techniques, namely GenProg, Kali, Cardumen, RsRepair and Arja. We subsequently discuss several findings and implications for future APR studies. Overall, experiment results show that our dataset is complementary to existing datasets such as Defect4J in realistic evaluations of APR.

Manually finding the program unit (e.g., class, method, or statement) responsible for a fault is tedious and time-consuming. To mitigate this problem, many fault localization techniques have been proposed. A popular family of such techniques is spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL), which takes program execution traces (spectra) of failed and passed test cases as input and applies a ranking formula to compute a suspiciousness score for each program unit. However, most existing SBFL techniques fail to consider two facts: 1) not all failed test cases contribute equally to a considered fault(s), and 2) program units collaboratively contribute to the failure/pass of each test case in different ways.

Software developers use a variety of social media channels and tools in order to keep themselves up to date, collaborate with other developers, and find projects to contribute to. Meetup is one of such social media used by software developers to organize community gatherings. We in this work, investigate the dynamics of Meetup groups and events related to software development. Our work is different from previous work as we focus on the actual event and group data that was collected using Meetup API. In this work, we performed an empirical study of events and groups present on Meetup which are related to software development. First, we identified 6,327 Meetup groups related to software development and extracted 250,36 9 events organized by them. Then we took a sample of 452 events on which we performed open coding, based on which we were able to develop 9 categories of events (8 main categories +“Others”). Next, we did a popularity analysis of the categories of events and found that Talks by Domain Experts, Hands-on Sessions, and Open Discussions are the most popular categories of events organized by Meetup groups related to software development. Our findings show that more popular categories are those where developers can learn and gain knowledge. On doing a diversity analysis of Meetup groups we found 20.46% of the members on average are female, and 20.34% of the actual event participants are female, which is a larger proportion as compared to numbers reported in previous studies on gender representation in software engineering communities. We also found evidence that the gender of Meetup group organizer affects gender distribution of group members and event participants. Finally, we also looked at some data on how COVID-19 has affected the Meetup activity and found that the event activity has dropped, but not stalled. A substantial number of events are now being organized virtually. The results and insights uncovered in our work can guide future studies related to software communities, groups, and diversity-related studies.

The gender gap is a significant concern facing the software industry as the development becomes more geographically distributed. Widely shared reports indicate that gender differences may be specific to each region. However, how complete can these reports be with little to no research reflective of the Open Source Software (OSS) process and communities software is now commonly developed in? Our study presents a multi-region geographical analysis of gender inclusion on GitHub. This mixed-methods approach includes quantitatively investigating differences in gender inclusion in projects across geographic regions and investigate these trends over time using data from contributions to 21,456 project repositories. We also qualitatively understand the unique experiences of developers contributing to these projects through a survey that is strategically targeted to developers in various regions worldwide. Our findings indicate that gender diversity is low across all parts of the world, with no substantial difference across regions. However, there has been statistically significant improvement in diversity worldwide since 2014, with certain regions such as Africa improving at faster pace. We also find that most motivations and barriers to contributions (e.g., lack of resources to contribute and poor working environment) were shared across regions, however, some insightful differences, such as how to make projects more inclusive, did arise. From these findings, we derive and present implications for tools that can foster inclusion in open source software communities and empower contributions from everyone, everywhere.