It Will Never Work in Theory

Software development research that is relevant in practice

Browsing Posts in Case Studies

Marian Petre: “UML in practice” ICSE’13, 2013. http://oro.open.ac.uk/35805/. UML has been described by some as “the lingua franca of software engineering”. Evidence from industry does not necessarily support such endorsements. How exactly is UML being used in industry — if it is? This paper presents a corpus of interviews with 50 professional software engineers in [...]

Chris Lewis, Zhongpeng Lin, Caitlin Sadowski, Xiaoyan Zhu, Rong Ou, and E. James Whitehead Jr.: “Does Bug Prediction Support Human Developers? Findings From a Google Case Study.” ICSE’13, 2013, http://www.cflewis.com/publications/google.pdf?attredirects=3D0. While many bug prediction algorithms have been developed by academia, they’re often only tested and verified in the lab using automated means. We do not [...]

Nachiappan Nagappan, E. Michael Maximilien, Thirumalesh Bhat, and Laurie Williams. “Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams“. ESE 2008. Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development practice that has been used sporadically for decades. With this practice, a software engineer cycles minute-by-minute between writing failing unit tests and [...]