Microservice systems (MSS) have become a predominant architectural style for cloud services. Yet the community still lacks high-quality, publicly available datasets for anomaly detection (AD) and root cause analysis (RCA) in MSS. Most benchmarks emphasize performance-related faults and provide only one or two monitoring modalities, limiting research on broader failure modes and cross-modal methods. To address these gaps, we introduce a new multimodal anomaly dataset built on two open-source microservice systems: SocialNetwork and TrainTicket. We design and inject four categories of anomalies (Ano): performance-level, service-level, database-level, and code-level, to emulate realistic anomaly modes. For each scenario, we collect five modalities (Mod): logs, metrics, distributed traces, API responses, and code coverage reports, offering a richer, end-to-end view of system state and inter-service interactions. We name our dataset, reflecting its unique properties, as AnoMod. This dataset enables (1) evaluation of cross-modal anomaly detection and fusion/ablation strategies, and (2) fine-grained RCA studies across service and code regions, supporting end-to-end troubleshooting pipelines that jointly consider detection and localization.

Researchers in the microservices community often resort to demonstrating the impact of their proposed advancements on custom-made microservices projects. This is a possible source of bias that can reduce the trustworthiness of the results. Moreover, it is hard to compare advances in small projects, often developed due to lack of time. It is common across disciplines to recognize benchmarks that mitigate bias and unify the advancements' impact. To facilitate the identification of available open-source microservice projects (OSS-MS), we performed a comprehensive study to identify, curate, and catalog OSS-MS. We started with 389559 projects and filtered them down to 3804 projects that we manually labeled. After manual labeling, our dataset contains 378 projects with three or more microservices and with over 100 commits. We document the projects from many perspectives, including project size, platform, number of contributors, project purpose, and foundation support. This dataset can serve researchers as a roadmap to identify benchmarks, as our dataset can be used to answer questions such as whether the number of services impacts the issue count.

Social media is now an important source of everyday information. Given the plethora of scandals concerning the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media, the credibility of the content on these platforms is now a pivotal research area. Much of the existing work on social media credibility focuses on content credibility. In this study, however, we focus on the credibility of the profile as the virtual representation of the content author. We developed a real-time machine-learning-based online tool that assesses the credibility of profiles on Twitter, one of the most common and versatile social media platforms. To investigate user perceptions on credibility-related issues, we used our tool as a stimulus for people to reflect on their profile’s credibility and collected 100 responses. The combination of our quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals that the latest tweets and retweet behavior are two of the most critical factors for profile credibility. It is also observed that people demonstrate a limited interest in their profile credibility but agree that the author’s credibility is of paramount importance. With an open-source tool to assess user credibility on Twitter and a user study to establish its utility, we contribute a timely piece of research on the topic of online credibility.

Most Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) research utilizes explicit SATD features such as ‘TODO’ and ‘FIXME’ for SATD detection. A closer look reveals several SATD research uses simple SATD (‘Easy to Find’) code comments without contextual data (preceding and succeeding source code context). This work addresses this gap through PENTACET (or 5C dataset) data. PENTACET is a large Curated Contextual Code Comments per Contributor and the most extensive SATD data. We mine 9,096 Open Source Software Java projects totaling over 400 million LOC. The outcome is a dataset with 23 million code comments, preceding and succeeding source code context for each comment, and more than 250,000 SATD comments, including both ‘Easy to Find’ and ‘Hard to Find’ SATD. We believe PENTACET data will further SATD research using Artificial Intelligence techniques.

Numerous tools exist for mining source code and software development process metrics. However, very few publicly available tools focus on source code comments, a crucial software artifact. This paper presents SoCCMiner (Source Code-Comments and Comment-Context Miner), a tool that offers multiple mining pipelines. It is the first readily available (plug-and-play) and customizable open-source tool for mining source code contextual information of comments at different granularities (Class comments, Method comments, Interface comments, and other granular comments). Mining comments at different source code granularities can aid researchers and practitioners working in a host of applications that focus on source code comments, such as Self-Admitted Technical Debt, Program Comprehension, and other applications. Furthermore, SoCCMiner is highly adaptable and extendable to include additional attributes and support other programming languages. This prototype supports the Java programming language.

A high imbalance exists between technical debt and non-technical debt source code comments. Such imbalance affects Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) detection performance, and existing literature lacks empirical evidence on the choice of balancing technique. In this work, we evaluate the impact of multiple balancing techniques, including Data level, Classifier level, and Hybrid, for SATD detection in Within-Project and Cross-Project setup. Our results show that the Data level balancing technique SMOTE or Classifier level Ensemble approaches Random Forest or XGBoost are reasonable choices depending on whether the goal is to maximize Precision, Recall, F1, or AUC-ROC. We compared our best-performing model with the previous SATD detection benchmark (cost-sensitive Convolution Neural Network). Interestingly the top-performing XGBoost with SMOTE sampling improved the Within-project F1 score by 10% but fell short in Cross-Project set up by 9%. This supports the higher generalization capability of deep learning in Cross-Project SATD detection, yet while working within individual projects, classical machine learning algorithms can deliver better performance. We also evaluate and quantify the impact of duplicate source code comments in SATD detection performance. Finally, we employ SHAP and discuss the interpreted SATD features. We have included the replication package1and shared a web-based SATD prediction tool2with the balancing techniques in this study.

Data of long-lived and high profile projects is valuable for research on successful software engineering in the wild. Having a dataset with different linked software repositories of such projects, enables deeper diving investigations. This paper presents 20-MAD, a dataset linking the commit and issue data of Mozilla and Apache projects. It includes over 20 years of information about 765 projects, 3.4M commits, 2.3M issues, and 17.3M issue comments, and its compressed size is over 6 GB. The data contains all the typical information about source code commits (e.g., lines added and removed, message and commit time) and issues (status, severity, votes, and summary). The issue comments have been pre-processed for natural language processing and sentiment analysis. This includes emoticons and valence and arousal scores. Linking code repository and issue tracker information, allows studying individuals in two types of repositories and provide more accurate time zone information for issue trackers as well. To our knowledge, this the largest linked dataset in size and in project lifetime that is not based on GitHub.

Open source development contains contributions from both hired and volunteer software developers. Identification of this status is important when we consider the transferability of research results to the closed source software industry, as they include no volunteer developers. While many studies have taken the employment status of developers into account, this information is often gathered manually due to the lack of accurate automatic methods. In this paper, we present an initial step towards predicting paid and unpaid open source development using machine learning and compare our results with automatic techniques used in prior work. By relying on code source repository meta-data from Mozilla, and manually collected employment status, we built a dataset of the most active developers, both volunteer and hired by Mozilla. We define a set of metrics based on developers' usual commit time pattern and use different classification methods (logistic regression, classification tree, and random forest). The results show that our proposed method identify paid and unpaid commits with an AUC of 0.75 using random forest, which is higher than the AUC of 0.64 obtained with the best of the previously used automatic methods.

The use of natural language processing (NLP) is gaining popularity in software engineering. In order to correctly perform NLP, we must pre-process the textual information to separate natural language from other information, such as log messages, that are often part of the communication in software engineering. We present a simple approach for classifying whether some textual input is natural language or not. Although our NLoN package relies on only 11 language features and character tri-grams, we are able to achieve an area under the ROC curve performances between 0.976-0.987 on three different data sources, with Lasso regression from Glmnet as our learner and two human raters for providing ground truth. Cross-source prediction performance is lower and has more fluctuation with top ROC performances from 0.913 to 0.980. Compared with prior work, our approach offers similar performance but is considerably more lightweight, making it easier to apply in software engineering text mining pipelines. Our source code and data are provided as an R-package for further improvements.

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 pattern of developers in the context of Mozilla Firefox, a large and long-lived open source project. To that end we investigate the impact of the move from traditional to rapid release cycle on work pattern. Moreover we compare Mozilla Firefox work pattern with another Mozilla product, Firefox OS, which has a different release cycle than Firefox. We find that both projects exhibit healthy working patterns, i.e. lower activity during the weekends and outside of office hours. Firefox experiences proportionally more activity on weekends than Firefox OS (Cohen's d = 0.94). We find that switching to rapid releases has reduced weekend work (Cohen's d = 1.43) and working during the night (Cohen's d = 0.45). This result holds even when we limit the analyzes on the hired resources, i.e. considering only individuals with Mozilla foundation email address, although, the effect sizes are smaller for weekends (Cohen's d = 0.64) and nights (Cohen's d = 0.23). Moreover, we use dissimilarity word clouds and find that work during the weekend is more technical while work during the week expresses more positive sentiment with words like "good" and "nice". Our results suggest that moving to rapid releases have positive impact on the work health and work-life-balance of software engineers. However, caution is needed as our results are based on a limited set of quantitative data from a single organization.

Emotional arousal increases activation and performance but may also lead to burnout in software development. We present the first version of a Software Engineering Arousal lexicon (SEA) that is specifically designed to address the problem of emotional arousal in the software developer ecosystem. SEA is built using a bootstrapping approach that combines word embedding model trained on issue-tracking data and manual scoring of items in the lexicon. We show that our lexicon is able to differentiate between issue priorities, which are a source of emotional activation and then act as a proxy for arousal. The best performance is obtained by combining SEA (428 words) with a previously created general purpose lexicon by Warriner et al. (13,915 words) and it achieves Cohen's d effect sizes up to 0.5.

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 Dominance (VAD) are able to derive a person's interest (attraction), level of activation and perceived level of control for a particular situation from textual communication, such as emails. As an initial step towards identifying symptoms of productivity loss in software engineering, this paper explores the VAD metrics and their properties on 700,000 Jira issue reports containing over 2,000,000 comments, since issue reports keep track of a developer's progress on addressing bugs or new features. Using a general-purpose lexicon of 14,000 English words with known VAD scores, our results show that issue reports of different type (e.g., Feature Request vs. Bug) have a fair variation of Valence, while increase in issue priority (e.g., from Minor to Critical) typically increases Arousal. Furthermore, we show that as an issue's resolution time increases, so does the arousal of the individual the issue is assigned to. Finally, the resolution of an issue increases valence, especially for the issue Reporter and for quickly addressed issues. The existence of such relations between VAD and issue report activities shows promise that text mining in the future could offer an alternative way for work health assessment surveys.