Courtney Miller

Hi, welcome! I'm a 4th year Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University co-advised by Bogdan Vasilescu and Christian Kästner. Prior to joining CMU, I graduated from New College of Florida with my BA in Computer Science and Statistics. My primary research interests are open source sustainability and supply chain security, empirical software engineering research, and developer productivity, coordination, and communication. I am an NSF GRFP Fellow and have two Distinguised Paper Awards at premier venues in software engineering.

In my work, I use a multi-dimensional empirical approach to understand and improve the socio-technical challenges faced by developers within software development and maintenance processes. More specifically, I am passionate about supporting developers and teams by designing mixed-methods research protocols combining human-centered qualitative techniques with large-scale data-driven statistical analysis, modeling, and visualization to develop insights and inform the design of custom solutions.

In my free time I enjoy indoor cycling, going on leisurely walks with my 13-year-old toy poodle Chanel, and watching reality TV (my current favorites are Summer House and Real Housewives of Miami). If you'd like to hear more about my work, are interested in collaborating, or just want to say hi, please reach out!

Understanding the Response to Open-Source Dependency Abandonment in the npm Ecosystem

IEEE/ACM International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025

We perform a large-scale quantitative analysis of all widely-used npm packages and find that abandonment is common among them, that abandonment exposes many projects which often do not respond, that responses correlate with other dependency management practices, and that removal is significantly faster when a package’s end-of-life status is explicitly stated. We end with recommendations to both researchers and practitioners who are facing dependency abandonment or are sunsetting packages, such as opportunities for low-effort transparency mechanisms to help exposed projects make better, more informed decisions.

Paper / Supplementary Material / Infographic / Details

"We Feel Like We're Winging It:" A Study on Navigating Open-Source Dependency Abandonment

ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), 2023

We conduct semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 33 developers who have experienced open-source dependency abandonment and perform iterative qualitative content analysis to collect, curate, and contextualize the experiences and practices of developers who have dealt with open-source dependency abandonment.

Paper / Slides / Presentation Video / Supplementary Material / Details

"Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions Distinguished Paper Award

IEEE/ACM International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE), 2022

We take a first stride at understanding the characteristics of open source toxicity to better inform future work on designing effective intervention and detection methods. We curate and qualitatively analyze a sample of 100 toxic GitHub issue discussions to gain an understanding of the characteristics of open-source toxicity.

Paper / Slides / Presentation Video / Infographic / Details

"How Was Your Weekend?" Software Development Teams Working From Home During COVID-19 Distinguished Paper Award

IEEE/ACM International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE), 2021

We investigate how development team collaboration, communication, and productivity have been impacted by the rapid shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. We perform two surveys at a large software company to identify the challenges relating to inter and intra team collaboration and communication and use statistical modeling to quantify how those challenges impact changes in self-reported productivity levels.

Paper / Slides / Presentation Video / Supplementary Material / Details

Why Do People Give Up FLOSSing? A Study of Contributor Disengagement in Open Source

IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), 2019

We conduct a mixed-methods empirical study, combining surveys and survival modeling, to identify the reasons and predictive factors behind established open source contributor project disengagement.

Paper / Slides / Details