Research

Understanding how developers use — and rely on — the crowd.

I study crowdsourcing in software engineering, empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, and software ecosystems, using data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis on historical project data. Below: current research areas and a full list of publications, each with a short summary figure and a PDF download.

Research areas

Mining software repositories Empirical software engineering Software evolution and maintenance Software reuse Crowdsourced software engineering Data-driven software engineering Software ecosystems

Publications

28 entries

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ASE 2023 · International Conference on Automated Software Engineering · 2023

Where to Go Now? Finding Alternatives for Declining Packages in the npm Ecosystem

S. Mujahid, D. Elias Costa, R. Abdalkareem, and E. Shihab

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ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) · 2023

Dependency Update Strategies and Package Characteristics

A. Javan Jafari, D. Elias Costa, E. Shihab, and R. Abdalkareem

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Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) · 2023

Qualitative Analysis of Security-Related Code Reviews: An Empirical Study

M. Alfadel, N. Nagy, D. Costa, R. Abdalkareem, and E. Shihab

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Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) · 2023

What are the Characteristics of High-used Packages? A Case Study on the npm Ecosystem

S. Mujahid, R. Abdalkareem, and E. Shihab

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ESEC/FSE 2022 · Foundations of Software Engineering · 2022

23 Shades of Self-Admitted Technical Debt: An Empirical Study on Machine Learning Software

D. O'Brien, S. Biswas, S. Imtiaz, R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and H. Rajan

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ICSOC 2022 — Distinguished Paper Award · 2022

Combining Static and Dynamic Analysis to Decompose Monolithic Application into Microservices

K. Sellami, M. Aymen Saied, A. Ouni, and R. Abdalkareem

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ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) · 2022

On Wasted Contributions: Understanding the Dynamics of Contributor-Abandoned Pull Requests

S. Khatoonabadi, D. Elias Costa, R. Abdalkareem, and E. Shihab

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MSR 2022 Mining Challenge — Best Student Presentation · 2022

On the Co-Occurrence of Refactoring of Test and Source Code

N. Alexandre Nagy and R. Abdalkareem

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IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (TEM) · 2021

Towards Using Package Centrality Trend to Identify Packages in Decline

S. Mujahid, D. Elias Costa, R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, M. Saied, and B. Adams

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IEEE TSE — invited to ICSE 2022 as Journal First · 2021

Dependency Smells in JavaScript Projects

A. Javan Jafari, D. Elias Costa, R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and N. Tsantalis

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IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) · 2021

On the Untriviality of Trivial Packages: An Empirical Study of npm JavaScript Packages

A. Reza Chowdhury, R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and B. Adams

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MSR 2021 Mining Challenge Track · 2021

How Effective is Continuous Integration in Indicating Single-Statement Bugs?

J. Latendresse, R. Abdalkareem, D. Elias Costa, and E. Shihab

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IEEE TSE — invited to ICSE 2022 as Journal First · 2021

Breaking Type Safety in Go: An Empirical Study on the Usage of the unsafe Package

D. Costa, S. Mujahid, R. Abdalkareem, and E. Shihab

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Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) · 2020

Helping or not Helping? Why and How Trivial Packages Impact the npm Ecosystem

X. Chen, R. Abdalkareem, S. Mujahid, E. Shihab, and X. Xia

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Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) · 2020

On the Removal of Feature Toggles: A Study of Python Projects and Practitioners' Motivations

J. Hoyos, R. Abdalkareem, S. Mujahid, E. Shihab, and A. Espinosa

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MSR 2020 · Mining Software Repositories · 2020

Using Others' Tests to Avoid Breaking Updates

S. Mujahid, R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and S. McIntosh

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MSR 2020 · Mining Software Repositories · 2020

Challenges in Chatbot Development: A Study of Stack Overflow Posts

A. Abdellatif, D. E. Costa, K. Badran, R. Abdalkareem, and E. Shihab

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IEEE TSE — invited to ICSE 2021 as Journal First · 2020

A Machine Learning Approach to Improve the Detection of CI Skip Commits

R. Abdalkareem, S. Mujahid, and E. Shihab

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Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) · 2020

On the Impact of Using Trivial Packages: An Empirical Case Study on npm and PyPI

R. Abdalkareem, V. Oda, S. Mujahid, and E. Shihab

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IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) · 2019

Which Commits Can Be CI Skipped?

R. Abdalkareem, S. Mujahid, E. Shihab, and J. Rilling

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Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) · 2018

An Empirical Study of Android Wear User Complaints

S. Mujahid, G. Sierra, R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and W. Shang

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ICSME 2018 · Software Maintenance and Evolution · 2018

Studying Permission-Related Issues in Android Wearable Apps

S. Mujahid, R. Abdalkareem, and E. Shihab

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IEEE Software — Special Issue on Crowdsourcing for Software Engineering · 2017

What Do Developers Use the Crowd For? A Study Using Stack Overflow

R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and J. Rilling

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Information and Software Technology (IST) · 2017

On Code Reuse from StackOverflow: An Exploratory Study on Android Apps

R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and J. Rilling

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ESEC/FSE 2017 · Foundations of Software Engineering · 2017

Why Do Developers Use Trivial Packages? An Empirical Case Study on npm

R. Abdalkareem, O. Nourry, S. Wehaibi, S. Mujahid, and E. Shihab

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ESEC/FSE 2017 · Student Research Competition · 2017

Reasons and Drawbacks of Using Trivial npm Packages: The Developers' Perspective

R. Abdalkareem

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ICSME 2017 · Software Maintenance and Evolution · 2017

An Empirical Study on the Removal of Self-Admitted Technical Debt

E. Maldonado, R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and A. Serebrenik

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MOBILESoft 2017 · 2017

Examining User Complaints of Wearable Apps: A Case Study on Android Wear

S. Mujahid, G. Sierra, R. Abdalkareem, E. Shihab, and W. Shang

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Full, up-to-date list also available on Google Scholar and DBLP.