Researchers, students and practitioners often encounter a situation when the build process of a third-party software system fails. In this paper, we aim to confirm this observation present mainly as anecdotal evidence so far. Using a virtual environment simulating a programmer's one, we try to fully automatically build target archives from the source code of over 7,200 open source Java projects. We found that more than 38% of builds ended in failure. Build log analysis reveals the largest portion of errors are dependency-related. We also conduct an association study of factors affecting build success.

c 2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This is the accepted version of: M. Sulír, M. Bačíková, S. Chodarev, J. Porubän. Visual augmentation of source code editors: A systematic mapping study. AbstractSource code written in textual programming languages is typically edited in integrated development environments or specialized code editors. These tools often display various visual items, such as icons, color highlights or more advanced graphical overlays directly in the main editable source code view. We call such visualizations source code editor augmentation.In this paper, we present a first systematic mapping study of source code editor augmentation tools and approaches. We manually reviewed the metadata of 5,553 articles published during the last twenty years in two phases -keyword search and references search. The result is a list of 103 relevant articles and a taxonomy of source code editor augmentation tools with seven dimensions, which we used to categorize the resulting list of the surveyed articles.We also provide the definition of the term source code editor augmentation, along with a brief overview of historical development and augmentations available in current industrial IDEs.

A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two controlled experiments, we seek to answer the following 3 research questions: 1) Do programmers' mental models overlap? 2) How do developers use shared concern annotations when they are available? 3) Does using annotations created by others improve program comprehension and maintenance correctness, time and confidence? The first study shows that developers' mental models, recorded using concern annotations, overlap and thus can be shared. The second study shows that shared concern annotations can be used during program comprehension for the following purposes: hypotheses confirmation, feature location, obtaining new knowledge, finding relationships and maintenance notes.The first controlled experiment with students showed that the presence of annotations significantly reduced program comprehension and maintenance time by 34%. The second controlled experiment was a differentiated replication of the first one, focused on industrial developers. It showed a 33% significant improvement in correctness. We conclude that concern annotations are a viable way to share developers' thoughts.

Abstract-Attribute-oriented programming (source code annotations) is a program level marking technique that enables enrichment of program elements with custom metadata. In this paper we hypothesize that there is a correspondence between source code annotations and conventional formal languages in general. We analyze our observations about source code annotations from three aspects of language description: concrete syntax, abstract syntax, and semantics. The discussion provides evidence of the hypothesized correspondence and we use it as a basis for our definition of an annotation-based language (abbreviated: @L). However, the analysis also shows that compared to conventional formal languages, source code annotations have some specificities mainly connected to their binding to host program elements. The presented analysis contributes to the field of attributeoriented programming by discussing the relationship between annotations and conventional formal languages, and by surveying relational idioms in annotations' usage that can be inspirational for annotations' authors.

Abstract-Context: Developers possess mental models containing information far beyond what is explicitly captured in the source code. Objectives: We investigate the possibility to use source code annotations to capture parts of the developers' mental models and later reuse them by other programmers during program comprehension and maintenance. Method: We performed two studies and a controlled experiment. Results: Developers' mental models overlap and thus can be shared. Possible use cases of shared annotations are hypotheses confirmation, feature location, obtaining new knowledge, finding relationships and maintenance notes. In the experiment, the presence of annotations reduced program comprehension and maintenance time by 34%. Conclusion: Annotations are a viable way to share programmers' thoughts.