Peer Code Review in Research Software: Practices, Improvements, and Implementation Challenges from Interviews of RSEs

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.

Institutionalizing Research Software Engineering Practices Through an Academic Open Source Program Office

Research Software Engineering (RSE) has emerged as a critical professional practice supporting sustainable, reusable, and high-impact research software. However, many academic institutions lack organizational structures that consistently support RSE community building, training pathways, and collaboration across research domains. This paper reports on the Gegoria Tech Open Source Program Office (OSPO@GT) as an institutional mechanism for advancing RSE practices through coordinated education, student pipelines, and cross-unit collaboration. Drawing on three years of operational experience, we describe how OSPO activities – including community guidelines, training programs, and student engagement models – have functioned as RSE capacity-building interventions. We discuss outcomes, challenges, and lessons learned, with a focus on RSE community development and education. Our experience suggests that OSPOs can play a complementary role to RSE groups by lowering barriers to entry, scaling training, and embedding RSE best practices within research computing environments.

Requirements Engineering Challenges and Solutions in Open‐Source Software Development

This research aims to identify and validate key challenges and their solutions within the RE process for open‐source software development (OSSD) and propose best practices to address these challenges.

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.

Evaluating the Effects of Automated Test Results, Model Solutions, and Checklists on Peer Code Review: A Quantitative Study

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.