In this paper we provide a brief introduction to some of the games user research activities at Microsoft. We focus on the analysis of automatically collected game data. We will show how this data can lead to insights about game usage and player progression.

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Please consider submitting to the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2012), part of SPLASH in Tucson, Arizona, USA. I am on the program committee. Please submit your papers by April 13, 2012. The conference will be held in the week of October 19-26, 2012.

The scope of OOPSLA includes all aspects of programming languages and software engineering, broadly construed. Papers may address any aspect of software development, including requirements, modeling, prototyping, design, implementation, generation, analysis, verification, testing, evaluation, maintenance, reuse, replacement, and retirement of software systems. Papers on tools (such as new languages, program analyses, or runtime systems) or or techniques (such as new methodologies, design processes, code organization approaches, and management techniques) designed to reduce the time, effort, and/or cost of creating software systems or improving their performance, quality and/or usability are of particular interest.

This poster will be presented this weekend at The Future of Collaborative Software Development workshop at CSCW 2012.

Read the position paper Collaborative Software Development in Ten Years: Diversity, Tools, and Remix Culture (with Chris Bird).

Software development is a data rich activity with many sophisticated metrics. Yet engineers often lack the tools and techniques necessary to leverage these potentially powerful information resources toward decision making. In this paper, we present the data and analysis needs of professional software engineers, which we identified among 110 developers and managers in a survey. We asked about their decision making process, their needs for artifacts and indicators, and scenarios in which they would use analytics.

The survey responses lead us to propose several guidelines for analytics tools in software development including: Engineers do not necessarily have much expertise in data analysis; thus tools should be easy to use, fast, and produce concise output. Engineers have diverse analysis needs and consider most indicators to be important; thus tools should at the same time support many different types of artifacts and many indicators. In addition, engineers want to drill down into data based on time, organizational structure, and system architecture.

Co-author: Raymond P.L. Buse (The University of Virginia)

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Fixing bugs is an important part of the software development process. An underlying aspect is the effectiveness of fixes: if a fair number of fixed bugs are reopened, it could indicate instability in the software system. To the best of our knowledge there has been on little prior work on understanding the dynamics of bug reopens. Towards that end, in this paper, we characterize when bug reports are reopened by using the Microsoft Windows operating system project as an empirical case study. Our analysis is based on a mixed-methods approach. First, we categorize the primary reasons for reopens based on a survey of 358 Microsoft employees. We then reinforce these results with a large-scale quantitative study of Windows bug reports, focusing on factors related to bug report edits and relationships between people involved in handling the bug. Finally, we build statistical models to describe the impact of various metrics on reopening bugs ranging from the reputation of the opener to how the bug was found.

Co-authors: Nachiappan Nagappan (Microsoft Research), Philip J. Guo (Stanford University), and Brendan Murphy (Microsoft Research)

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Please consider submitting to the 6th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement 2012 (ESEM 2012) in Lund, Sweden. I am on the program committee. Please submit your papers by March 11, 2012 (abstracts: March 4). The conference will be held on September 19-20, 2012.

The ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) is the premier conference to present research results related to empirical software engineering. These include the discussion of: i) strengths and weaknesses of software engineering technologies and methods from an empirical viewpoint; ii) the design and analysis of empirical studies, ranging from controlled experiments to field studies and from quantitative to qualitative studies; iii) the use of data and measurement to understand, evaluate, and model software engineering phenomena. The symposium encourages the presentation of both novel work and replication studies.

ESEM provides a stimulating forum where researchers and practitioners can present and discuss recent research results on a wide range of topics, in addition to also exchanging ideas, experiences and challenging problems.

Please consider submitting to the 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2012) in Chicago, Illinois, USA. I am on the program committee of the industry track. Please submit your papers by March 5, 2012 (abstracts: February 27). The conference will be held on September 24-28, 2012.

TThe IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE12) is the premier international forum for researchers, educators, industrial practitioners, and students to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and concerns in the field of requirements engineering.

As an industrial contributor, you will be able to highlight challenges and discuss ideas and new innovations in the field of requirements engineering with fellow practitioners and researchers alike. You will have the opportunity to share interests and expectations, and influence the development of the field. RE12 will give you the opportunity to join the global network of requirements engineering experts and industrials.

Please consider submitting to the 9th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2012), co-located with ICSE 2012 in Zurich, Switzerland. I am on the program committee. Please submit your papers by February 10, 2012 (abstracts February 6). The conference will be held on June 2-3, 2012.

Software repositories such as source control systems, archived communications between project personnel, and defect tracking systems are used to help manage the progress of software projects. Software practitioners and researchers are recognizing the benefits of mining this information to support the maintenance of software systems, improve software design/reuse, and empirically validate novel ideas and techniques. Research is now proceeding to uncover the ways in which mining these repositories can help to understand software development and software evolution, to support predictions about software development, and to exploit this knowledge concretely in planning future development.

The goal of this two-day working conference is to advance the science and practice of software engineering via the analysis of data stored in software repositories.

Thanks for an exciting 2011. Wishing everyone all the best for 2012!

The Wordle below shows what I’ve been up to this year in terms of papers and travel. Not surprisingly, there are two major words: “data” and “software”. Noteworthy papers are The Inductive Software Engineering Manifesto (with Tim Menzies et al.) and Failure is a Four-Letter Word, also known as the “IROP paper” (with Andreas Zeller and Chris Bird). I was very fortunate to work with many fantastic visitors and interns in the Empirical Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research over the past year. In Hawaii, I co-organized the Mining Software Repositories conference (with Tao Xie and Arie van Deursen). I got reappointed as adjunct assistant professor at University of Calgary and became affiliate faculty at University of Washington. I also rediscovered my love to anime and manga—in fact I am going to Anime Expo next year—and was very excited to see The Art of Collecting Bug Reports (with Rahul Premraj) to be translated for the Japanese edition of Making Software.

For next year watch out for papers on recent research on branches (with Chris Bird) and computer games (with Nachi Nagappan), as well as some other exciting topics. The year 2012 will also bring more travel: I will spend one month in Bangalore (MSR India). I will also make several trips to Austin for pleasure (SXSW, Fantastic Fest) and possibly work (CHI). And of course I will try to make it to ICSE.

Please consider submitting to the 4th International Workshop on Search-driven development: Users, Infrastructure, Tools and Evaluation (SUITE 2012), co-located with ICSE 2012 in Zurich, Switzerland. I am on the program committee. Please submit your papers by February 17, 2012. The workshop will be held on June 5, 2012.

As software development is a process of both information creation and information gathering, software developers are constantly engaged in activities that search for the pertinent information to solve their problems at hand. The information needs of software developers range from those related to code (writing, changing, fixing, communicating) to process (requirements and design) and people (colleagues). SUITE has become a successful workshop series that seeks to understand and find solutions addressing the information needs of software developers. SUITE 2012 will again provide a forum for academic and industrial researchers to discuss high quality research on how to support software developers through innovative search solutions. SUITE 2012 will emphasize on consolidating and complementing the results of previous SUITE workshops, and continue building an active network of people interested in research centered around tailored information delivery for software developers.