TL;DR I wrote an opinion piece with my friend Christoph Treude on qualitative data analysis (QDA) in the GenAI era. We conclude that it has great capability in speeding up the process (e.g., transcription, finding codes) but is fundamentally and philosophically at odds with Big-Q reflexive data analysis. Below I elaborate on my perspective, which Christoph may not agree with! Paper:…
Topic models are statistical methods that automatically discover themes in large collections of text by identifying patterns of words that tend to appear together. They represent each document as a mixture of topics, where each topic is a distribution over words. They are frequently used in qualitative content analysis, e.g., to see which topics occur in a set of documents, like historical…
Why We Care About Technical Debt Technical Debt refers to the short-term optimizations – shortcuts – that are taken with potential for longer-term consequences. A typical example is to forego extensive unit testing in order to get a product to market. Once the product is released, in theory the dev team goes back and does it the right way. Often, they do not go back (there’s another fire to put…
Prof. Andreas Zeller posted about peer review collusion circles in software engineering (SE), and what to do about it. It’s a fascinating article especially for someone, like me who a) has never been to a physical PC meeting, more’s the pity; b) currently a PC chair for a moderately big conference, and soon to be area chair for ICSE 27. Peer review, briefly I’ll start by saying I am gravely…
Overview 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 topic, along with some open research questions. While it is mainly for our own use, perhaps others will find this helpful. It is mainly an extended lit review somewhat loosely organized into themes. Scientific…
Faculty at a research university wear many different hats. One analogy might be to the executive roles in a company. Now a company tries to make profit, which is usually not the goal in academia (quite the contrary). But still, one can think of the mapping like Title Tasks for Faculty Member CEO Strategy, overall planning, team management CFO Budgeting, managing funds, making “payroll” CIO…
The typical Science workflow is something like A - Related work: build a Prior about a real world problem, like pulsar formation B - Fieldwork: Collect data about that problem in the ‘field’ C - Model: Build a model of the problem D - Posterior: Generate a posterior/data output E - Analyze: draw inferences about A, updating the prior if necessary. We can have several types of problems - “debt” -…
Bots as assistants The state of bots 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 either API endpoints (CI tools), developer assistants, or something more sophisticated. I don’t think there is much to say about CI tooling. This is a spectrum in my view; we will likely see CI…
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 blended practice and research. It also was the first place to accept one of my papers so I will always have a soft spot for it, and for Essen , industrial city or not. The…
Most courses have a series of learning outcomes for students. Once you have done the course (and, I assume, gotten a B or some reasonably high mark), then you know how to accomplish the learning outcomes. Some may break those learning outcomes down to smaller units per module. For instructors, it occurs to me there are three objectives to balance (at least): How much effort it takes to teach the…
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 (co-located with ICSME) with a tool to demo, live, to the other attendees. One of the goals was a tool that worked on unseen data. This year, at our…
Academic job interview season is wrapping up, so I thought I’d capture the process from the Canada point of view. Academic CS jobs in Canada follow mostly the same pattern and process as the US (here I am talking about research-focused, tenure-track roles). Hence I think most of the advice from Philip Guo , and Wes Weimer and his academic offspring , are totally applicable (and indeed, were what I…
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, global metric value (“all software objects with this value or below are maintainable”) is nonsensical, if only because programming language choice is important. So we want to tailor…
There has recently been more discussion about software documentation (or perhaps that’s because I only see what I’m interested in… hard to say). At any rate, it seems a lot of discussion inevitably breaks down to “what tool will solve my documentation problems” (e.g., this thread ). Others have tried to “fix” UML by proposing new modeling approaches (forgetting, perhaps, that the unified modeling…
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 . This is a great opportunity to work with some of the top software engineering faculty in the world, in one of the best cities in the world (although I’m biased, as it is my hometown :). Victoria is at the forefront of the startup…
In response to Greg Wilson’s challenge , I did a quick attempt at a Visual Abstract for a recent paper . Visual Abstract: Identifying Design Rules in Static Analysis Tools. Evaluated 464 rules, 19% design related, 67% easy to classify. I think it turned out ok; it captures the core findings and presumably will prompt people to look at the paper. I’ve attached the Keynote slide I used in a repo on…
I’ve read 2 papers recently (references) about using active learning to improve classification for software engineering. Active Learning is the idea that, if we have a feature space with instances, for the classification task of labeling an instance either “A” or “B”, there are clumps of points that clearly are As, and another clump that are clearly Bs. In between, however, the boundary is…
Amy Ko had a great presentation at a conference on programming languages (PL), that he also video taped for a wider audience. I’d always thought of PL as “things”, or material. The program was the interesting bit; the PL was the material that constructed it. But I guess as I extend that metaphor, it seems clear that it falls short. Cedar, for instance, is a material, and the building is the…
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”. Hike Name Length Elevation Gain Elevation Notes Black Tusk 29km/18mi 1740 m/5700’ 7600’ Highly exposed last section up remaining volcanic core. See details Lions 16km/10mi 1280m/4200’ 5427’ I remember when we did it in 2001 or so there being little…
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 . What are you trying to do I would like to sail to India and bring back gold and spices for the Crown of Spain. How is it done today Currently no one has sailed west. Everyone takes the trip east, around the Cape of Good Hope.…