For most of the past six decades, software measurement relied on labor-intensive manual collection of proprietary data, which hampered progress. The shift to repurposing traces from version control and related tools dramatically expanded data availability$\unicode{x2014}$especially with the rise of open-source software$\unicode{x2014}$but hinged on an often unstated assumption: that these tools are used by professional developers to build genuine software systems. However, as trace-generating tools, data types and scale, and empirical methods have all evolved, it has become clear that changes in data generation and analytical approaches affect many prior findings about software development, maintenance, and evolution. With AI agents now actively using these same tools, the resulting traces frequently violate the original assumption of human origin. To preserve the relevance of software measurement research, immediate action is needed: We must detect when foundational assumptions are violated in contemporary data and develop new methodologies that remain valid under changed circumstances. To this end, we propose a systematic AI-assisted replication program that revisits key findings using modern techniques, aiming for methods that yield consistent results on current data to keep software measurement meaningful.
Thomas Bock, Audris Mockus, Bogdan Vasilescu· 0 citations
Coding agents increase development velocity but also technical debt. Prior work reports only average effects across adopters, hiding wide differences between teams. We introduce RAMP (Repository AI Maturity Profile), a four-level cumulative maturity model grounded in version-controlled artifacts that teams commit to configure AI tools. RAMP runs from behavioral rules and coding standards through named agent definitions to multi-agent orchestration, with observed practice concentrated in the first three levels. Across 441 repositories the levels behave as a cumulative scale, and independent human annotation reproduces RAMP's repository-level labels on 97% of a held-out sample. Adoption is cumulative, forward-only, and set-and-forget: 73.8% of artifacts are committed once and never modified. Re-estimating an existing agent-adoption panel within each stratum, agents accelerate development regardless of maturity (28-38% more commits), but quality diverges: among agent-first repositories, where the contrast is identified, those without committed AI configuration show roughly twice the increase in cognitive complexity (+53% versus +27%) and 1.7x the increase in static-analysis warnings. Because maturity is observational, correlated engineering discipline or model capability may explain part of the gap; we present these findings as hypothesis-generating and release RAMP as a reusable instrument.
Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Shyam Agarwal, P. S. Azaletskiy et al.· 0 citations
SpecMine lets the community study, for the first time, how software is specified in the age of AI agents through two censuses: a broad census of spec.md files and a census-wide index of typed references.
