Jim Whitehead and I have edited a special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering journal with some of the best papers of MSR 2010. The special issue has been published today. The same issue also contains best papers from MSR 2009 (edited by Michael Godfrey and Jim Whitehead).

Read the special issue:
Empirical Software Engineering, Volume 1 / 1996 – Volume 17 / 2012

In the first paper, “Clones: What is that Smell?”, Rahman, Bird, and Devanbu try to validate conventional wisdom that cloning makes code more defect-prone by analyzing the software repositories of four open-source projects. Assessing the validity of common software engineering folklore is a frequent application of mining software repositories. The findings in the paper do not support the claim that clones are generally a “bad smell”—especially with respect to defects. They found that clones may be even less defect-prone than non-cloned code. They also found little evidence that clones with more copies are actually more error prone. As put it in the paper, “perhaps we can clone, and breathe easily, at the same time.”

In the paper “Evaluating Defect Prediction Approaches: A Benchmark and an Extensive Comparison”, D’Ambros, Lanza, and Robbes introduce several novel datasets for defect prediction. As they put it “predicting software defects is one of the holy grails of software engineering”. Over the past years, researchers have devised and implemented literally hundreds of defect prediction approaches (read the systematic review by Hall et al. (2011) for a good summary). However, the absence of benchmarks made it difficult to compare approaches. In their paper, D’Ambros et al. present a benchmark and provide an extensive comparison of well-known defect prediction approaches, together with novel approaches that they devised. The benchmark is available at http://bug.inf.usi.ch/

In the paper, “The Evolution of Java Build Systems”, McIntosh, Adams, and Hassan study the build systems of six open-source projects. While build systems are important to create the executable files of software, especially in industry, build systems have largely been ignored by research until recently. McIntosh et al. observed that the sizes of the build system and source code are highly correlated and that often restructuring the source code also required restructuring the build system. Understanding build processes helps project managers to better allocate personnel and resources to the build system.

Tibor Gyimothy and I are organizing the Industry Track of the 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2012) in Riva del Garda, Trento, Italy. Please consider submitting! Papers are due by June 27, 2012. The conference will be held in the week of September 23-30, 2012.

The Industry Track of the ICSM 2012 conference aims to bring together people from both academia and industry in a venue that highlights practical and real world studies of software maintenance. This track aims to foster mutually beneficial links between those engaged in scientific research and practitioners working to make software maintenance efficient. We are interested in results (both good and bad), obstacles, and lessons learned associated with applying software maintenance practices. Experiences from practitioners provide crucial input into future research directions and allow others to learn from successes and failures.

For the industry track, we invite submissions of state-of-the-art descriptions, state-of-the-art practice and experience reports, and survey reports from real-world projects and industrial experiences. If you apply in an industrial context a method, model or tool, which you know was earlier presented at ICSM or other software engineering conference, we also warmly encourage you to submit a paper to this track.

Branching plays a major role in the development process of large software. Branches provide isolation so that multiple pieces of the software system can be modified in parallel without affecting each other during times of instability. However, branching has its own issues. The need to move code across branches introduces additional overhead and branch use can lead to integration failures due to conflicts or unseen dependencies. Although branches are used extensively in commercial and open source development projects, the effects that different branch strategies have on software quality are not yet well understood. In this paper, we present the first empirical study that evaluates and quantifies the relationship between software quality and various aspects of the branch structure used in a software project. We examine Windows Vista and Windows 7 and compare components that have different branch characteristics to quantify differences in quality. We also examine the effectiveness of two branching strategies – branching according to the software architecture versus branching according to organizational structure. We find that, indeed, branching does have an effect on software quality and that misalignment of branching structure and organizational structure is associated with higher post-release failure rates.

Co-authors: Emad Shihab (Queen’s University), Christian Bird (Microsoft Research)

[click for more details...]

Please consider submitting to the 4th International Workshop on Empirical Software Engineering in Practice (IWESEP 2012) in Osaka, Japan. I am on the program committee. Please submit your papers by June 22, 2012 (abstracts: June 8). The workshop will be held October 26-27, 2012.

The objective of the 4th International Workshop on Empirical Software Engineering in Practice (IWESEP) is to foster the development of the area by providing a forum where researchers and practitioners can report on and discuss new research results and applications in the area of empirical software engineering. The workshop encourages the exchange of ideas within the international community so as to be able to understand, from an empirical viewpoint, the strengths and weaknesses of technology in use and new technologies, with the expectation of furthering the more generic field of software engineering.

The workshop focuses on the processes, design and structure of empirical studies as well as the results of specific studies. These studies may be on original or replicated studies, varying from controlled experiments to field studies, from quantitative to qualitative. We solicit full research papers (max 6 pages) and short papers (max 2 pages).

Please consider submitting to the Empirical Software Engineering journal. I serve as as a member of the editorial board.

Empirical Software Engineering provides a forum for applied software engineering research with a strong empirical component, and a venue for publishing empirical results relevant to both researchers and practitioners. Empirical studies presented here usually involve the collection and analysis of data and experience that can be used to characterize, evaluate and reveal relationships between software development deliverables, practices, and technologies. Over time, it is expected that such empirical results will form a body of knowledge leading to widely accepted and well-formed theories.

James Walden and Stephan Neuhaus are organizing the International Workshop on Security Measurements and Metrics (MetriSec 2012), in Lund, Sweden, co-located with ESEM. Please consider submitting! Papers are due by May 30, 2012. The workshop is on September 21, 2012.

Quantitative assessment is a major stumbling block for software and system security. Although some security metrics exist, they are rarely adequate. The engineering importance of metrics is intuitive: you cannot consistently improve what you cannot measure. Economics is an additional driver for security metrics: vendors will only invest in security if customers will pay for it, and customers will only pay a premium for security that is measurably improved.

The goals of the MetriSec workshops are to showcase and foster research into security measurements and metrics and to keep building the community of individuals interested in this area. MetriSec continues the tradition started by the Quality of Protection (QoP) workshop series. As in the previous year, the co-location with ESEM is an opportunity for the security metrics folks to meet the metrics community at large.

Please consider participating in the Software Experts Summit 2012: Mastering Uncertainty in the Software Industry: Risks, Rewards, and Reality

organized by the IEEE Software magazine
June 26, 2012 at the British Computer Society in London

Deadline for early registration: register before May 15, 2012
http://www.computer.org/ses12

The level of uncertainty and complexity, as well as the rate of change, are growing in all aspects of business and the world around us. These forces are compelling the software community to quickly adapt its development approaches to enable success.

The Software Experts Summit 2012 will address many aspects of this theme. Speakers include:

• Michael Feathers (Groupon) on Technical Debt, Process and Culture – the Hidden Linkages
• Mike Andrews (Microsoft, Principal Security Strategist for Bing) on Systems, Tools, and Processes that Allow Bing to Scale
• Christof Ebert (Vector Consulting Services) on Practical Decision-Making in Software Engineering and Its Business Relevance
• Hakan Erdogmus (Kalemun Research) and John Favaro (Intecs SpA) on the Economic Perspective of Agile Software Development
• Diomidis Spinellis (Athens University of Economics and Business, prior Secretary General for Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance on Theory meets reality: Managing IT Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance
• Les Hatton (Oakwood Computing Association) on Software Defects, as well as
• A Panel on the Impact of Software moderated by Michiel van Genuchten and Les Hatton with panelists from Microsoft, Shell International, and TomTom

The event is inexpensively priced (early registration is 100 GBP, normal registration is 120 GBP). Register BEFORE May 15, 2012 to get the early registration price.

If you are interested in trying out the digital edition of “IEEE Software” please visit the IEEE Software site at Qmags. You can download a free sample digital copy of the Jan/Feb 2011 issue.

Please consider submitting to the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process. I serve as as a member of the editorial board.

The way in which software systems are conceived, built, and managed is changing profoundly. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process (JSEP) is the new peer-reviewed journal dealing with such changes, addressing the issues of software conception, development, management, evolution and improvement with a multidisciplinary view that encompasses technologies, processes, services, people, and organizations.

Borne from two parent journals (Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice and Software Process: Improvement and Practice) the new journal will continue and enrich the tradition of these journals, publishing high-quality and influential papers on the topics covered, and opening the door to new perspectives and insights.

Read the Editors’ introduction to JSEP

Please consider submitting to the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2012) in Dallas, Texas, USA. I am on the program committee. Please submit your papers by May 18, 2012 (abstracts: May 11). The conference will be held in the week of November 27-30, 2012.

The IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering is the premium conference in the area. Over the past 20+ years we have grown to be recognized as the voice of software reliability. ISSR 2012 is focused on innovative techniques and tools for assessing, predicting, and improving the reliability, safety, and security of software products. ISSRE also emphasizes industrial relevance, rigorous empirical studies and experience reports.