Papers › Understanding and Improving Artifact Sharing in Software Engineering Research
Understanding and Improving Artifact Sharing in Software Engineering Research
Christopher S. Timperley, Lauren Herckis, Claire Le Goues, Michael Hilton
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
In recent years, many software engineering researchers have begun to include artifacts alongside their research papers. Ideally, artifacts, including tools, benchmarks, and data, support the dissemination of ideas, provide evidence for research claims, and serve as a starting point for future research. However, in practice, artifacts suffer from a variety of issues that prevent the realization of their full potential. To help the software engineering community realize the full potential of artifacts, we seek to understand the challenges involved in the creation, sharing, and use of artifacts. To that end, we perform a mixed-methods study including a survey of artifacts in software engineering publications, and an online survey of 153 software engineering researchers. By analyzing the perspectives of artifact creators, users, and reviewers, we identify several high-level challenges that affect the quality of artifacts including mismatched expectations between these groups, and a lack of sufficient reward for both creators and reviewers. Using Diffusion of Innovations as an analytical framework, we examine how these challenges relate to one another, and build an understanding of the factors that affect the sharing and success of artifacts. Finally, we make recommendations to improve the quality of artifacts based on our results and existing best practices.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections