MSR 2026
Mon 13 - Tue 14 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
co-located with ICSE 2026

This program is tentative and subject to change.

We analyse developer coordination in Kubernetes, a large open source project comparable in scale to a major enterprise software division. Over 11 years, 25,953 contributors created 46,768 issues and 339,332 comments, providing a complete record of collaboration rarely visible in proprietary settings. We examine how contributors organise themselves across technical domains and how coordination affects development outcomes. Our results show that collaboration is highly modular, with contributors interacting 42.9 times more often within domains than across them. Issues related to multiple domains take 4.19 times longer to resolve (due to both coordination complexity and issue difficulty), and coordination within the modules depends on a small subset of contributors. These findings demonstrate how large-scale coordination dependencies can be observed and quantified in open source development, offering a transferable tool for analyzing enterprise-scale software projects.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 14 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

11:00 - 12:30
Session 1-B: Maintenance, Evolution & ProcessesTechnical Papers / MSR Program at Oceania IV
11:00
10m
Talk
Source Code Hotspots: A Diagnostic Method for Quality Issues
Technical Papers
Saleha Muzammil University of Virginia, Mughees Ur Rehman Virginia Tech, Zoe Kotti AUEB & DeepSea Technologies, Diomidis Spinellis AUEB & TU Delft
Pre-print
11:10
10m
Talk
Evolving Kubernetes: A Technical Debt Perspective
Technical Papers
Jesse Maarleveld University of Groningen, Giuseppe Destefanis University College London, Daniel Feitosa University of Groningen
11:20
10m
Talk
How do third-party Python libraries use type annotations?
Technical Papers
Eric Asare New York University Abu Dhabi, Sarah Nadi New York University Abu Dhabi
Pre-print
11:30
10m
Talk
Coordination at Scale in Large Distributed Development: The Case of Kubernetes
Technical Papers
Sabrina Aufiero University College London (UCL), Matteo Vaccargiu University of Cagliari, Silvia Bartolucci University College London, Fabio Caccioli University College London (UCL), Giuseppe Destefanis University College London
11:40
10m
Talk
Combining Example-Based and Rule-Based Program Transformations to Resolve Build Conflicts
Technical Papers
Sheikh Shadab Towqir Virginia Tech, Fei He Tsinghua University, Todd Mytkowicz Google, Na Meng Virginia Tech
Pre-print
11:50
10m
Talk
Mining Quantum Software Patterns in Open-Source Projects
Technical Papers
Neilson Carlos Leite Ramalho Universidade de São Paulo, Erico Augusto Da Silva Universidade de São Paulo, Higor Amario de Souza University of São Paulo, Marcos Lordello Chaim University of São Paulo
12:00
10m
Talk
Analyzing Dependency Distribution Changes Arising from Code Smell Interactions
Technical Papers
Zushuai Zhang University of Auckland, Elliott Wen , Ewan Tempero The University of Auckland
Pre-print
12:10
10m
Talk
The Value of Effective Pull Request Description
Technical Papers
Shirin Pirouzkhah University of Zurich, Pavlina Wurzel Goncalves University of Zurich, Alberto Bacchelli IfI, University of Zurich
Pre-print
12:20
10m
Talk
Promises, Perils, and (Timely) Heuristics for Mining Coding Agent Activity
Technical Papers
Romain Robbes CNRS, LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, Théo Matricon CNRS, LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, Thomas Degueule CNRS, Andre Hora UFMG, Stefano Zacchiroli LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France
Pre-print