The Third Bit

My grad student Mike Conley decided several months ago to look at code review for his master’s thesis. After exploring a few ideas (including badges and achievements for reviews), he has put together a plan that might tie several things together quite neatly. He and I would both appreciate your feedback.

Research

Rory Tulk finished his M.Sc. with me a couple of weeks ago, and has posted a summary of his thesis on his blog. It was a solid piece of research; I’m pleased to have had a chance to work with him.

Research

Mike Conley (one of my grad students) is converging on a thesis topic: pre-commit continuous integration. If you have thoughts, he’d enjoy hearing them.

Research

Several people have recently linked to Diederik van Liere’s talk “Learning from 10 yrs of Bugzilla data“. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, there’s a whole sub-field in software engineering devoted to mining information about actual development practices from various sources. The best two places to start are:

1. Kagdi, Collard, and Maletic: “A survey and taxonomy of approaches for mining software repositories in the context of software evolution“. Journal of Software Maintenance, 19(2), 2007.
2. Ahmed E. Hassan: “The Road Ahead for Mining Software Repositories“. In Proc. Future of Software Maintenance, at ICSM 2008.

My thanks to Mike Godfrey for the pointers.

Research

I blogged last week about Sahoo et al’s paper on automated bug diagnosis and Gutiart et al’s survey of performance management techniques for web apps. This week has brought two more good ones to my desk:

1. Artzi, Dolby, Tip, and Pistoia: “Practical Fault Localization for Dynamic Web Applications”. The authors have extended the Tarantula algorithm, which combines actual and symbolic execution, to produce a tool that can automatically localize 87% of faults in PHP applications to within 1% of all executed statements. Just imagine: if you can make it crash, the tool can cut the amount of code you have to examine by two decimal orders of magnitude almost nine times out of ten.
2. Mitchell, Schonberg, and Sevitsky: “Four Trends Leading to Java Runtime Bloat.” The authors, who work at IBM making Java run faster, explain how building software in layers leads to chronic performance problems. Technical but readable—I’m giving it to the students in my software engineering course.

Research

Three of my grad students—Aran Donohue, Jason Montojo, and Rory Tulk—are wrapping up their MSc’s this month. Coincidentally (OK, not really, the academic calendar being what it is), my other two students are converging on research topics. Mike Conley has got the code review bug in a big way, and wants to look at how we can teach students to review code, and whether doing that will have an impact on how (and how well) they program. Zuzel Vera Pacheco is going to look at ways of annotating or animating visual representations of databases, such as entity-relationship diagrams, in order to help developers understand system architecture, debug things, and gauge the likely impact of changes. If you’re interested in either topic, I’m sure they’d enjoy hearing from you.

Research

Three recent papers:

1. Sahoo, Criswell, and Adve: “Towards Automated Bug Diagnosis: An Empirical Study of Reported Software Bugs in Server Applications”.  Looked at bugs reported in six large web server apps, and discovered that most could be reproduced deterministically by replaying just a few recent inputs (in most cases, just one). Over 60% of bugs resulted in silent data corruption, which means that adding more internal consistency checks and assertions would help weed them out; only a handful were non-deterministic or timing based. Upshot is, keeping a log of the last few requests and saving that when a bug crops up has a good chance of helping developers localize the bug quickly. Excellent piece of empirical research.
2. Gutiart, Torres, and Ayguadé: “A survey on performance management for internet applications”. Summarizes published results on request scheduling, admission control, dynamic resource management, service degradation, and other approaches, both empirical and theoretical. A good map of the terrain.
3. Demsky and Lam: “Views: Object-Inspired Concurrency Control”. The idea is that developers define one or more views that describe which method(s) of a class can safely be run concurrently with which others; a clique-finding algorithm then automatically generates the locks and locking calls required to ensure safety. Nice idea, but as with so many papers in programming languages, there’s no empirical validation: do real programmers find this comprehensible? Does it make coding easier than [name of alternative goes here]? Does it lower error rates? Etc. Most papers on tools and methods at ICSE now include some kind of empirical study, even in their early stages; here’s hoping the practice spreads to programming language design.

Research

Like a lot of people, I received email a few days ago from Ivar Jacobson about SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory), a new initiative whose “…goal is to re-found software engineering as a rigorous discipline.” I can’t think of a better response than Jorge Aranda’s.

Research

The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is being held in South Africa next year. Their web site is already up, and they’ve just announced all the workshops and whatnot that are being held along with it. It’s quite a list, and some of the acronyms are very impressive too

• 2nd International Workshop on Search-Driven Development – Users, Infrastructure, Tools & Evaluation (SUITE 2010)
• 3rd International Workshop on Socio-Technical Congruence (STC 2010)
• 2nd International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service Oriented Systems (PESOS)
• 3rd International Workshop on Multicore Software Engineering (IWMSE 2010)
• 6th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Secure Systems (SESS)
• Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2010)
• 5th Workshop on SHAring and Reusing architectural Knowledge (SHARK)
• Product Line Approaches in Software Engineering (PLEASE 2010)
• Flexible Modeling Tools (FlexiTools2010)
• 1st ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering for Sensor Network Applications (SESENA)
• 5th International Workshop on Automation of Software Test (AST 2010)
• 5th Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2010)
• 2nd International Workshop on Software Research and Climate Change (WSRCC)
• 1st International Workshop on Quantitative Stochastic Models in the Verification and Design of Software Systems (QUOVADIS)
• 2nd Intl. Workshop on Software Engineering in Health Care (SEHC)
• 2nd International Workshop on Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering (RSSE 2010)
• 1st Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering (Web2SE)
• Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)
• 1st International Workshop on Replication in Empirical Software Engineering Research (RESER)
• 3rd Workshop on Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development (FLOSS-3)
• 3rd Workshop on Software Development Governance (SDG)
• 4th International Workshop on Software Clones (IWSC2010)
• International Workshop on Problem-Oriented Software Development
• Comparison and Versioning of Software Models (CVSM)

The odds are against me being there (can’t afford it, and it starts before the end of my self-imposed year-long no-fly pledge), but we’re hoping to have an early draft of the O’Reilly book on evidence-based software engineering ready in time to review there.

Making Software, Research

A special issue of Computing in Science & Engineering that Andy Lumsdaine and I edited, devoted to software engineering in computational science, is now available. We’d like to thank everyone who contributed:

• Report on the Second International Workshop on Software Engineering for CSE, by Jeffrey Carver (University of Alabama)
• Managing Chaos: Lessons Learned Developing Software in the Life Sciences, by Sarah Killcoyne and John Boyle (Institute for Systems Biology)
• Scientific Computing’s Productivity Gridlock: How Software Engineering Can Help, by Stuart Faulk (University of Oregon), Eugene Loh and Michael L. Van De Vanter (Sun Microsystems), Susan Squires (Tactics), and Lawrence G. Votta, (Brincos)
• Mutation Sensitivity Testing, by Daniel Hook (Engineering Seismology Group Solutions) and Diane Kelly (Royal Military College of Canada)
• Automated Software Testing for MATLAB, by Steve Eddins (The MathWorks)
• The libflame Library for Dense Matrix Computations, by Field G. Van Zee, Ernie Chan, and Robert A. van de Geijn (University of Texas at Austin), and Enrique S. Quintana-Ortí and Gregorio Quintana-Ortí (Universidad Jaime I de Castellón)
• Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change, by Steve Easterbrook (University of Toronto) and Timothy Johns (Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research)

Announcements, Research