It Will Never Work in Theory

Software development research that is relevant in practice

Browsing Posts in Mining

10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories May 18-19, 2013. San Francisco, CA, USA http://2013.msrconf.org Co-located with the 35th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013) Sponsored by IEEE TCSE and ACM SIGSOFT NEW IN 2013! Data papers for describing data sets curated by their authors and making them available to the research community [...]

Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude, Lars Grammel, and Margaret-Anne Storey. Crowd Documentation: Exploring the Coverage and the Dynamics of API Discussions on Stack Overflow. Georgia Tech Technical Report, 2012. Traditionally, many types of software documentation, such as API documentation, require a process where a few people write for many potential users. The resulting documentation, when it [...]

Foutse Khomh, Tejinder Dhaliwal, Ying Zou, and Bram Adams: Do Faster Releases Improve Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Mozilla Firefox. MSR 2012 Nowadays, many software companies are shifting from the traditional 18-month release cycle to shorter release cycles. For example, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox release new versions every 6 weeks. These shorter [...]

Abram Hindle, Earl Barr, Zhendong Su, Prem Devanbu, and Mark Gabel. “On the Naturalness of Software”, ICSE 2012. Natural languages like English are rich, complex, and powerful. The highly creative and graceful use of languages like English and Tamil, by masters like Shakespeare and Avvaiyar, can certainly delight and inspire. But in practice, given cognitive [...]

Daryl Posnett, Abram Hindle, and Prem Devanbu. “Got Issues? Do New Features and Code Improvements Affect Defects?“ WCRE 2011. There is a perception that when new features are added to a system that those added and modified parts of the source-code are more fault prone. Many have argued that new code and new features are [...]

(Re-posted from my blog, Catenary –Jorge Aranda) If you keep track of recent developments in empirical software engineering, you may have already heard of the fantastic IROP study. I was too busy writing a paper to blog about it when Andreas Zeller presented it at PROMISE 2011, but here I go, in case you haven’t [...]

Yuriy Brun, Reid Holmes, Michael D. Ernst, and David Notkin. “Proactive Detection of Collaboration Conflicts”, ESEC/FSE 2011. Collaborative development can be hampered when conflicts arise because developers have inconsistent copies of a shared project. We present an approach to help developers identify and resolve conflicts early, before those conflicts become severe and before relevant changes [...]

Andrew Meneely, Pete Rotella, and Laurie Williams. “Does Adding Manpower Also Affect Quality? An Empirical, Longitudinal Analysis.” ESEC/FSE 2011. With each new developer to a software development team comes a greater challenge to manage the communication, coordination, and knowledge transfer amongst teammates. Fred Brooks discusses this challenge in The Mythical Man-Month by arguing that rapid team [...]

Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Brendan Murphy, Harald Gall, and Premkumar Devanbu: “Don’t Touch My Code! Examining the Effects of Ownership on Software Quality.” ESEC/FSE’11, 2011. Ownership is a key aspect of large-scale software development. We examine the relationship between different ownership measures and software failures in two large software projects: Windows Vista and Windows 7. [...]

Audris Mockus, “Organizational Volatility and its Effects on Software”. FSE 2010: The key premise of an organization is to allow more efficient production, including production of high quality software. To achieve that, an organization defines roles and reporting relationships. Therefore, changes in organization’s structure are likely to affect product’s quality. We propose and investigate a [...]