Greatest Hits
November 24th, 2009
The list of contributors to the upcoming O’Reilly book on evidence-based software engineering seems to have settled down—we’re very grateful to everyone listed below for agreeing to take part, and hope that the book will be available in the summer of 2010.
- Jorge Aranda: radical collocation vs. doors that close
- Tom Ball and Nachi Nagappan: how to predict software failures
- Victor Basili: a retrospective on the Software Engineering Lab
- Andrew Begel: problems new developers encounter
- Christian Bird: effect of organizational structure on development
- Barry Boehm: cost to fix vs. time, and how much architecting is enough
- Marcelo Cataldo: managing dependencies in distributed software development
- Steven Clarke: the usability of APIs
- Jason Cohen: effectiveness of code reviews
- Rob DeLine: time spent communicating
- Khaled El Emam: the effect of code size on code metrics
- Hakan Erdogmus and Burak Turhan: test-driven development
- Mike Godfrey: copy-paste as a principled engineering tool
- Mark Guzdial: computer science education
- Jo Hannay: the effect of personality on pair programming
- Ahmed Hassan and Israel Herraiz: the constants of software
- Barbara Kitchenham: the value of aggregate studies
- Andrew Ko: epistemology
- Steve McConnell: productivity differences among programmers
- Audris Mockus: similarities and differences between open and closed source
- Gail Murphy and Neil Thomas: the modules developers work with are not the modules expressed in code
- Dewayne Perry: the underlying causes of faults
- Marian Petre and Lutz Prechelt: credibility
- Lutz Prechelt: effect of programming language choice on productivity
- Elaine Weyuker and Tom Ostrand: providing evidence of defects before they happen
- Andreas Zeller and Kim Herzig: mining project histories
- Tom Zimmermann and Rahul Premraj: beautiful bug reports
- Dieter Rombach: to be determined
- Diomidis Spinellis: engineering requirements drive code quality
- Forrest Shull: to be determined
- Janice Singer: navigation in information spaces
- Walter Tichy: the evidence for design patterns
- Gina Venolia: what developers draw
- Laurie Williams: pair programming
I’m a fan of Jason Cohen’s blog and writing but I’m a bit wary of adding him as an author in a book on evidence-based software engineering. I’m sure he’ll be completely honest but it sets a bad precedent of publishing an industry white paper with all the conflicts of interest that entails rather than peer-reviewed research.
I’ll still definitely buy the book though!
@Guillaume Many of the other contributors are also in companies (Microsoft, AT&T, etc.). I think software engineering would be a lot poorer if we excluded or discounted contributions from people who aren’t academics.
I’m not against accepting contributions from industry. They’re immensely valuable, especially in an evidence-based context, since they deal with the real-life scenarios all the time.
It’s just that Software Engineering is being added to the title and I tend to be wary of white papers. White papers get published when it makes the company look good but white papers that show flaws get buried. So you always have to take them with a grain of salt, especially when they make the case for buying a company’s main product. These papers often go through little independent verification so I have a hard time accepting them as Software Engineering.
They’re definitely very good paths for independent investigation, but until it’s confirmed by multiple third-parties I don’t buy in.
@Guillaume Every contribution is going through the same review process; if you have trouble accepting any of them, that’s up to you.
I’m a little surprised Tim Menzies isn’t here … he has some interesting work on when and where metrics are appropriate.