Enriched Event Streams: A General Platform For Empirical Studies On In-IDE Activities Of Software Developers

Current studies on software development either focus on the change history of source code from version-control systems or on an analysis of simplistic in-IDE events without context information. Each of these approaches contains valuable information that is unavailable in the other case. This work proposes enriched event streams, a solution that combines the best of both worlds and provides a holistic view on the in-IDE software development process. Enriched event streams not only capture developer activities in the IDE, but also specialized context information, such as source-code snapshots for change events. To enable the storage of such code snapshots in an analyzable format, we introduce a new intermediate representation called Simplified Syntax Trees (SSTs) and build CARET, a platform that offers reusable components to conveniently work with enriched event streams. We implement FeedBaG++, an instrumentation for Visual Studio that collects enriched event streams with code snapshots in the form of SSTs and share a dataset of enriched event streams captured in an ongoing field study from 81 users and representing 15K hours of active development. We complement this with a dataset of 69M lines of released source code extracted from 360 GitHub repositories. To demonstrate the usefulness of our platform, we use it to conduct studies on the in-IDE development process that are both concerned with source-code evolution and the analysis of developer interactions. In addition, we build recommendation systems for software engineering and analyze and improve current evaluation techniques

Automated Reporting of Anti-Patterns and Decay in Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a widely-used software engineering practice. The software is continuously built so that changes can be easily integrated and issues such as unmet quality goals or style inconsistencies get detected early. Unfortunately, it is not only hard to introduce CI into an existing project, but it is also challenging to live up to the CI principles when facing tough deadlines or business decisions. Previous work has identified common anti-patterns that reduce the promised benefits of CI. Typically, these anti-patterns slowly creep into a project over time before they are identified. We argue that automated detection can help with early identification and prevent such a process decay. In this work, we further analyze this assumption and survey 124 developers about CI anti-patterns. From the results, we build CI-Odor, a reporting tool for CI processes that detects the existence of four relevant anti-patterns by analyzing regular build logs and repository information. In a study on the 18,474 build logs of 36 popular Java projects, we reveal the presence of 3,823 high-severity warnings spread across projects. We validate our reports in a survey among 13 original developers of these projects and through general feedback from 42 developers that confirm the relevance of our reports

Data-Driven Decisions and Actions in Today’s Software Development

Today’s software development is all about data: data about the software product itself, about the process and its different stages, about the customers and markets, about the development, the testing, the integration, the deployment, or the runtime aspects in the cloud. We use static and dynamic data of various kinds and quantities to analyze market feedback, feature impact, code quality, architectural design alternatives, or effects of performance optimizations. Development environments are no longer limited to IDEs in a desktop application or the like but span the Internet using live programming environments such as Cloud9 or large-volume repositories such as BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab, or StackOverflow. Software development has become “live” in the cloud, be it the coding, the testing, or the experimentation with different product options on the Internet. The inherent complexity puts a further burden on developers, since they need to stay alert when constantly switching between tasks in different phases. Research has been analyzing the development process, its data and stakeholders, for decades and is working on various tools that can help developers in their daily tasks to improve the quality of their work and their productivity. In this chapter, we critically reflect on the challenges faced by developers in a typical release cycle, identify inherent problems of the individual phases, and present the current state of the research that can help overcome these issues

The impact of text topic and assumed human vs. AI authorship on competence and quality assessment

BackgroundWhile Large Language Models (LLMs) are considered positively with respect to technological progress and abilities, people are rather opposed to machines making moral decisions. But the circumstances under which algorithm aversion or algorithm appreciation are more likely to occur with respect to LLMs have not yet been sufficiently investigated. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate how texts with moral or technological topics, allegedly written either by a human author or by ChatGPT, are perceived.MethodsIn a randomized controlled experiment, n = 164 participants read six texts, three of which had a moral and three a technological topic (predictor text topic). The alleged author of each text was randomly either labeled “ChatGPT” or “human author” (predictor authorship). We captured three dependent variables: assessment of author competence, assessment of content quality, and participants' intention to submit the text in a hypothetical university course (sharing intention). We hypothesized interaction effects, that is, we expected ChatGPT to score lower than alleged human authors for moral topics and higher than alleged human authors for technological topics and vice versa.ResultsWe only found a small interaction effect for perceived author competence, p = 0.004, d = 0.40, but not for the other dependent variables. However, ChatGPT was consistently devalued compared to alleged human authors across all dependent variables: there were main effects of authorship for assessment of the author competence, p < 0.001, d = 0.95; for assessment of content quality, p < 0.001, d = 0.39; as well as for sharing intention, p < 0.001, d = 0.57. There was also a small main effect of text topic on the assessment of text quality, p = 0.002, d = 0.35.ConclusionThese results are more in line with previous findings on algorithm aversion than with algorithm appreciation. We discuss the implications of these findings for the acceptance of the use of LLMs for text composition

The mycotoxin phomoxanthone A disturbs the form and function of the inner mitochondrial membrane.

Mitochondria are cellular organelles with crucial functions in the generation and distribution of ATP, the buffering of cytosolic Ca2+ and the initiation of apoptosis. Compounds that interfere with these functions are termed mitochondrial toxins, many of which are derived from microbes, such as antimycin A, oligomycin A, and ionomycin. Here, we identify the mycotoxin phomoxanthone A (PXA), derived from the endophytic fungus Phomopsis longicolla, as a mitochondrial toxin. We show that PXA elicits a strong release of Ca2+ from the mitochondria but not from the ER. In addition, PXA depolarises the mitochondria similarly to protonophoric uncouplers such as CCCP, yet unlike these, it does not increase but rather inhibits cellular respiration and electron transport chain activity. The respiration-dependent mitochondrial network structure rapidly collapses into fragments upon PXA treatment. Surprisingly, this fragmentation is independent from the canonical mitochondrial fission and fusion mediators DRP1 and OPA1, and exclusively affects the inner mitochondrial membrane, leading to cristae disruption, release of pro-apoptotic proteins, and apoptosis. Taken together, our results suggest that PXA is a mitochondrial toxin with a novel mode of action that might prove a useful tool for the study of mitochondrial ion homoeostasis and membrane dynamics

Induction of New Lactam Derivatives From the Endophytic Fungus Aplosporella javeedii Through an OSMAC Approach

Fermentation of the endophytic fungus Aplosporella javeedii on solid rice medium in presence of either 3.5% NaNO3 or 3.5% monosodium glutamate caused a significant change of the fungal metabolite pattern compared to fungal controls grown only on rice. Chemical investigation of the former fungal extracts yielded 11 new lactam derivatives, aplosporellins A–K (2–12), in addition to the known compound, pramanicin A (1). All of these compounds were not detected when the fungus was grown on rice medium without these activators thereby indicating the power of this OSMAC approach. The structures of the new compounds were elucidated by one- and two- dimensional NMR spectroscopy, DFT-NMR calculations and by mass spectrometry as well as by comparison with the literature whereas the absolute configuration of the lactam core was determined by TDDFT-ECD and OR calculations. Pramanicin A (1) showed strong cytotoxicity against human lymphoma (Ramos) and leukemia (Jurkat J16) cells with IC50 values of 4.7 and 4.4 mM, respectively. Mechanistic studies indicated that 1 activates caspase-3 and induces apoptotic cell death

Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

Multimodal Communication in a Noisy Environment: A Case Study of the Bornean Rock Frog Staurois parvus

High background noise is an impediment to signal detection and perception. We report the use of multiple solutions to improve signal perception in the acoustic and visual modality by the Bornean rock frog, Staurois parvus. We discovered that vocal communication was not impaired by continuous abiotic background noise characterised by fast-flowing water. Males modified amplitude, pitch, repetition rate and duration of notes within their advertisement call. The difference in sound pressure between advertisement calls and background noise at the call dominant frequency of 5578 Hz was 8 dB, a difference sufficient for receiver detection. In addition, males used several visual signals to communicate with conspecifics with foot flagging and foot flashing being the most common and conspicuous visual displays, followed by arm waving, upright posture, crouching, and an open-mouth display. We used acoustic playback experiments to test the efficacy-based alerting signal hypothesis of multimodal communication. In support of the alerting hypothesis, we found that acoustic signals and foot flagging are functionally linked with advertisement calling preceding foot flagging. We conclude that S. parvus has solved the problem of continuous broadband low-frequency noise by both modifying its advertisement call in multiple ways and by using numerous visual signals. This is the first example of a frog using multiple acoustic and visual solutions to communicate in an environment characterised by continuous noise

Enriched Event Streams: A General Platform For Empirical Studies On In-IDE Activities Of Software Developers

Current studies on software development either focus on the change history of source code from version-control systems or on an analysis of simplistic in-IDE events without context information. Each of these approaches contains valuable information that is unavailable in the other case. This work proposes enriched event streams, a solution that combines the best of both worlds and provides a holistic view on the in-IDE software development process. Enriched event streams not only capture developer activities in the IDE, but also specialized context information, such as source-code snapshots for change events. To enable the storage of such code snapshots in an analyzable format, we introduce a new intermediate representation called Simplified Syntax Trees (SSTs) and build CARET, a platform that offers reusable components to conveniently work with enriched event streams. We implement FeedBaG++, an instrumentation for Visual Studio that collects enriched event streams with code snapshots in the form of SSTs and share a dataset of enriched event streams captured in an ongoing field study from 81 users and representing 15K hours of active development. We complement this with a dataset of 69M lines of released source code extracted from 360 GitHub repositories. To demonstrate the usefulness of our platform, we use it to conduct studies on the in-IDE development process that are both concerned with source-code evolution and the analysis of developer interactions. In addition, we build recommendation systems for software engineering and analyze and improve current evaluation techniques