Please consider submitting to the 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2013) in Palo Alto, California, USA. I am on the expert review panel of the research track. Please submit your papers by May 17 (abstracts: May 10). The conference will be held November 11-15, 2013.
The IEEE/ACM Automated Software Engineering (ASE) Conference series is the premier research forum for automating software engineering. Each year, it brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss foundations, techniques and tools for automating the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of large software systems. ASE 2013 invites high quality contributions describing significant, original, and unpublished results for submission in three categories: Technical Research Papers, Experience Papers, and New Ideas Papers
The organizational and social aspects of software engineering (SE) are now increasingly well investigated. This paper proposes that there are a number of approaches taken in research that can be distinguished not by their method or topic but by the different views they construct of the human agent acting in SE. These views have implications for the pragmatic outcome of the research, such as whether systems design suggestions are made, proposals for the development of practical reasoning tools or the effect of SNS on engineer’s sociability. This paper suggests that these studies tend to underemphasize the felt-life of engineers, a felt-life that is profoundly emotional though played in reference to ideas of moral propriety and ethics. This paper will present a study of this felt-life, suggesting it consists of a form of digital dwelling. The perspective this view affords are contrasted with process and ‘scientific’ approaches to the human agent in SE, and with the more humanistic studies of SE reasoning common in CSCW.
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Doing high quality research about the human side of software engineering necessitates the participation of real software developers in studies, but getting high levels of participation is a challenge for software engineering researchers. In this paper, we discuss several factors that software engineering researchers can use when recruiting participants, drawn from a combination of general research on survey design, research on persuasion, and our experience in conducting surveys. We study these factors by performing post-hoc analysis on several previously conducted surveys. Our results provide insight into the factors associated with increased response rates, which are neither wholly composed of factors associated strictly with persuasion research, nor those of conventional wisdom in software engineering.
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In this paper we present an analysis of revival actions in a third person shooter video game. We observe that players who revived their teammates played significantly more sessions. They appear also to be more skilled and successful in the game in terms of kills, wins, and deaths. We then discuss how to extend our analysis methodology to other types of social play as well as other games.
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Please consider submitting to the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2013) in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. I am on the program committee of the research track. Please submit your papers by April 24 (abstracts: April 17). The conference will be held in the week of September 22-28, 2013.
ICSM is the premiere international venue in software maintenance and evolution, where participants from academia, government, and industry meet and share ideas and experiences for solving critical software maintenance problems. ICSM 2013 will be held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Eindhoven is located in the province of North Brabant in the south of the Netherlands. The city counts 213,809 inhabitants (as of January 1st, 2010), which makes it the fifth-largest city of the Netherlands. Eindhoven is well known for modern art, design and technology.
ICSM 2013 will have five tracks: Research Track, Early Research Achievements (ERA) Track, Industry Track, Tools Track, and Doctoral Symposium.
by Tom on February 25, 2013
This talk actually featured a live demonstration of a real crash.
by Tom on January 28, 2013
We offer a case study illustrating three rules for reporting research to industrial practitioners. Firstly, report “relevant” results; e.g. this paper explores the effects of distributed development on software products. Second: “recheck” old results if new results call them into question. Many papers say distributed development can be harmful to software quality. Previous work by Bird et al. allayed that concern but a recent paper by Posnett et al. suggests that the Bird result was biased by the kinds of files it explored. Hence, this paper rechecks that result and finds significant differences in Microsoft products (Office 2010) between software built by distributed or collocated teams. At first glance, this recheck calls into question the widespread practice of distributed development. Our third rule is to “reflect” on results to avoid confusing practitioners with an arcane mathematical analysis. For example, on reflection, we found that the effect size of the differences seen in the collocated and distributed software was so small that it need not concern industrial practitioners. Our conclusion is that at least for Microsoft products, distributed development is not considered harmful.
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