Usability in software development practice: analysis of discussions on stack overflow and their relationship with non-functional requirements

LLMs’ reshaping of people, processes, products, and society in software development: a qualitative exploration with early adopters

Interviews with sixteen early-adopter software professionals who integrated LLM-based tools into their day-to-day work in early to mid-2023 offer actionable implications for developers, organizations, educators, and tool designers seeking to integrate LLMs responsibly into professional software practice.

Analysis of programming language design and its impact on software quality

How Technology Fails Developers: A Qualitative Investigation of Tool, Architecture, and Legacy System Deficiencies in Software Error Introduction

Purpose: This study investigated the technological deficiencies contributing to software errors in software products, examining how inadequacies in development tools, developer expertise gaps, architectural failures, modern technology adoption challenges, and legacy system constraints create conditions for software errors. Methodology: A qualitative phenomenological design was employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 experienced software developers averaging 14.5 years of experience in U.S.-based organizations across retail, healthcare, technology, and financial sectors. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis in NVivo 14, anchored in the Technological Context construct of the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. Findings: Five themes emerged from this study, theme 1. Inadequacies in development tools and practices- discovering the challenges with existing tools and developer practices; theme 2. Impact of developer expertise and practices on software quality- discusses how the individual work experience shows bias in software development; theme 3. System architecture and oversight failures- discusses the software errors caused due to poor architecture and error monitoring; theme 4. The role of modern technologies and automation- discusses the impact of AI coding assistants; theme 5. Challenges posed by legacy systems and external integrations- elaborates how legacy systems limit developers’ productivity and software innovation. These themes collectively constitute the Technological Error Origin Framework (TEOF). Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: This study provides the first developer-experience-grounded, phenomenologically anchored account of software error origins within the TOE framework. Organizations should invest in integrated error-detection toolchains, implement developer upskilling programs spanning both technical and domain knowledge, enforce architecture-first principles with mandatory monitoring, and establish structured legacy modernization roadmaps.

Understanding the developer and user perspectives of design pattern detection tools

Design Pattern Detection (DPD) tools are useful to support to the comprehension and maintenance of software systems. Although several DPD tools have been introduced over the years, they typically focus on a limited set of design patterns and programming languages. This paper aims to investigate (i) the reasons that motivate DPD tool designers to target specific design patterns and programming languages, and (ii) how potential users perceive the usefulness of DPD tools in practical software development scenarios. We conducted two online surveys. For the first survey, we reached out to designers of 42 DPD tools selected from a systematic literature review to obtain their perspectives on design decisions about pattern and language coverage, receiving 22% of such responses. For the second survey, we recruited 28 student and senior developers to help us understand their expectations, perceived benefits, and concerns related to the use of DPD tools. Within our sample, the findings suggest that participating tool designers often prioritize design patterns whose internal structure facilitates automated detection, while language support is frequently motivated by popularity and expected demand. From the perspective of tool users, DPD tools are expected to support development activities, such as program comprehension and software quality improvement. Unfortunately, usability difficulties, limited accuracy, and insufficient documentation often discourage them from adopting a tool. The responses suggest that some design decisions reported by participating DPD tool designers are aligned with practical and industrial considerations. However, the recurring lack of adequate documentation and usability support is a major barrier to wider usage. Taken as indicative evidence, these results suggest that future DPD tools should better balance detection capabilities and usability concerns, especially to meet the need of less experienced developers. Given the limited number of tool-designer respondents, conclusions about design rationale should be interpreted as indicative rather than representative of all DPD tool designers.

How developer coreness influences the patch-review process: A mixed-method study

The code integration process is critical for any distributed, large-scale open-source software (OSS) project. It serves as an implicit or explicit quality control gate and is inherently of a socio-technical nature in that the bare technical act of merging new code contributions is preceded by (oftentimes engaged) discussions and reviews. Given the reasonable and widely accepted assumption that professional experience and seniority lead to higher social credit in communities, more experienced developers are expected to get favored in this process, manifesting in higher probabilities of receiving feedback on contributions, or getting contributions accepted. We conjecture that exceptions to this pattern may indicate procedural issues and examine this hypothesis through a mixed-method study. To this end, we use developer coreness, a continuous proxy measure of experience that measures how important and connected a developer is within a project. We then study code integration processes of 16 popular OSS projects, employing a new methodology to measure the impact of developer coreness on these processes. This allows us to identify process-deviant projects, which we investigate qualitatively to determine whether unexpected observations indicate underlying procedural issues. Our findings show that developers with higher coreness values have a higher probability of getting code contributions accepted and, in many cases, of receiving feedback. Notably, projects identified as process-deviant often exhibit signs of procedural deficiencies, highlighting the practical utility of our methodological framework.

Software comprehension in code-centric and model-driven settings: an experimental comparison of models and code

It is demonstrated that models and code achieve comparable overall correctness, and thus models alone may be sufficient in model-centric scenarios where access to code is limited or unavailable, and a consistent structure-behavior comprehension gap is revealed.