Blog

Scientific Software Development

Structured Bibliography

We’ve been doing a lot of research in my group around scientific software and technical debt, funded by the Sloan Foundation. As part of that work, I’ve written a post about…

The PI as COO

Faculty at a research university wear many different hats. One analogy might be to…

The Scientific Method 2021 edition

The typical Science workflow is something like

On Bots in Software Engineering

There have been a number of categorizations of bots for software development. The main categories seem to be the ones that Erlenhov came up with, which look at bots as…

REFSQ Panel session on Open Data and RE Education

Together with Alessio Ferrari, I organized a panel at the well-regarded conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for System Quality, which is a mouthful but really nice working session on RE that has always nicely…

The Triumvirate of Teaching and Work Life Balance

teaching

Most courses have a series…

Running a Mining Challenge Using Kaggle

For the 2nd edition of the Dynamic Software Documentation (DysDoc) workshop, the organizing team wanted to push the boundary on how to engage the community in tool supported demos. Previously, we had asked participants to come to the workshop…

Academic Job Searches—A Canadian Perspective

Academic job interview season is wrapping up, so I thought I’d capture the process from the Canada point of view.

Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling in Software Engineering

At MSR18 in Gothenburg, I presented my work on using Bayesian inference to set software metrics thresholds. We want to set thresholds because for many software metrics, like coupling between objects (CBO), a single…

Seven Principles of Effective Documentation

There has recently been more discussion about software documentation (or perhaps that’s…

Moving to UVic

I’m excited to announce I will be taking up a position this fall as a tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria.

Visual Abstract attempt

In response to Greg Wilson’s challenge, I did a quick attempt at a Visual Abstract for a recent paper.

On Active Learning in Software Engineering

I’ve read 2 papers recently (references) about using active learning to improve classification for software engineering.

Thoughts on Amy Ko’s “PL as …” keynote

Amy Ko had a great presentation at a conference on programming languages (PL), that he also video taped for a wider audience.

Day Hikes

A list of long, high vertical day hikes I have done and wish to do. I think looking back the most common theme to all of them was “bring more water”.

Columbus’s Heilmeyer Catechism

I have no idea if Columbus had to have his “India Expedition” proposal peer-reviewed, but here is my interpretation of it according to the ever-popular Heilmeyer catechism.

On SCAM’s new “Engineering Track”

This year SCAM, the Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (located in Raleigh, NC, Oct 2–3 2016) includes an engineering track, as described here.…

On Using Open Data in Software Engineering

I recently reviewed data showcase papers for the Mining Software Repositories Conference, and I’m co-chair of the Engineering track (subsumes…

The Marginal Utility of Testing/Refactoring/Thinking

Andy Zaidman had an interesting presentation about test analytics. The takeaway for me was that a) people overestimate…

A Model of Software Quality Checks

Software quality can be automatically checked by tools like…

Requirements, Agile, and Finding Errors

It’s a long held view in the requirements engineering (RE) community…

How Writing Code is Like Making Steel

I saw an interesting keynote from Mark Harman recently, on search-based software improvement. Mark’s lab at UCL also pioneered this idea of automatic code transplants using optimization…

Garbage In, Garbage Out

My dad had this great cup from one of his vists to COMDEX (ostensibly to keep up with the latest in the tech world, which at the…

Running a “Critical Research Review” at #RE15

Today we conducted our first attempt at “Critical Research Reviews” (CRR) at our workshop on empirical requirements engineering (EmpiRE) at the…

A Field Study of Technical Debt

Over on the SEI blog, I’ve written up our survey results on technical debt.

Thoughts from a CodeFest

This past weekend was the Steel City Codefest. The idea is that community non-profits present some problem for which an “app” would…

Frameworks, libraries, and dependencies

The Gap Between User Requirements and Software Capabilities as Technical Debt

One of my favorite graphics is from Al Davis, in 1988. Aside: it is depressing how often we re-invent the wheel in this business.

Measuring programmer productivity is futile.

(I’ve typically posted long-form entries but so infrequently … )

Cults of Personality and Software Process Improvement

I’m a fan of the Cynefin framework. I find it a great tool for…

Software research shouldn’t be about the tools

complexity

IT

semantic web

It comes down to essential vs. accidental complexity, as outlined by Fred Brooks. What we research is new ways to ‘nibble’ at the accidental complexity: new languages (GO, S…

Evidence in Software Engineering

This post is spurred by a line in a paper of Walker Royce, son of Winston Royce, he of the “waterfall model” (misunderstood model). He says

Configuring SONAR with Maven on Mac

I had this issue a few times:

The Circle, a novel

The Circle is a novel about the tech/social networking industry, where fictional company the Circle plays the role of Twitter, Facebook and Google combined. The topic is certainly…

13 Great Software Architecture Papers

In the paper “The Past, Present and Future of Software Architecture”, the authors (Philippe Kruchten, Henk Obbink, and Judith Stafford) have a sidebar in which they list their selection of “Great Papers of Software Architecture”. I’ve tried to collect these…

Virtual Conferences

Virtual Conferences

Knowledge and complexity

Somewhat inspired by +Rob England, I tried a mapping of Rumsfeldian terminology to Cynefin (yes, i know this predates the SecDef!).

Some Advice on Doing a PostDoc in Software Engineering

Post-doc positions in CS are a growing part of the research landscape, as seen in this figure from the CRA:

The fuzzy notion of “business value”

Software development is rife with references to business value, particularly in agile approaches: the Agile Manifesto declares that “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through…

Obtaining a Pennsylvania Driver’s Licence with an H1-B

In case this helps other people:

Teaching Advanced Software Engineering

The course covers software architecture, with a focus on quality attributes, security, and formal methods. I liked the…

A stitch in time…

This blog post from the excellent complexity blog Godel’s Lost Letter is on the theory behind branch and bound search. One of my favourite things about this sort of analysis is how it it…

Using GitHub for 3rd Year Software Engineering

This past semester (Winter 2012), I was the instructor for UBC’s CPSC 310: Introduction to Software Engineering. As part of the course, students must complete a large-scale software project in teams of 4–5 in 2 months.…

What I learned at UofT

My dissertation is nearing approval (touch wood) and I have started a new position as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow and lecturer at UBC. I wanted to summarize my…

Writing Complex Latex Documents with Scrivener 2.1 and MultiMarkDown 3

mmd3

scrivener

thesis

I have another post that discusses my approach to writing my thesis using Scrivener. It’s out of date now because I transitioned to MultiMarkdown 3 (MMD3).

Should we care about evidence-based software engineering?

test

evidence

software

theory

Time for some contrariness. The current rage in the academic software research community is evidence-based practice. It’s in popular magazines, de…