The PI as COO
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, whic...
Posts by Year
2022
2021
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 mou...
2020
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 i...
2019
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.
2018
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 softwa...
2017
Seven Principles of Effective Documentation
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,...
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 ...
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.
2016
Thoughts on Andy Ko’s “PL as … “ keynote
Andy 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 He...
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 desc...
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 datasets, tools...
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 their unit test engineering (estimate:...
2015
A Model of Software Quality Checks
Software quality can be automatically checked by tools like SonarQube, CAST, FindBugs, Coverity, etc. But often these tools encompass several different class...
Requirements, Agile, and Finding Errors
It’s a long held view in the requirements engineering (RE) community that “if only we could do RE better, software development would be cheaper”. Here ‘doing...
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 tr...
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 time COMDEX represented). It...
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 2015 Requirem...
A Field Study of Technical Debt
Over on my employer’s 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 help them, and coders spe...
Frameworks, libraries, and dependencies
I’ve been doing a little thinking about frameworks lately. They fascinate me as 1) a realization of the vision of ‘pluggable software’ and reusable component...
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 … )
2014
Cults of Personality and Software Process Improvement
I’m a fan of the Cynefin framework. I find it a great tool for understanding what type of problem you are trying to solve. The notion of complex/complicated/...
Software research shouldn’t be about the tools
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 ...
2013
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. ...
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 whi...
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 ...
Obtaining a Pennsylvania Driver’s Licence with an H1-B
In case this helps other people:
2012
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 ...
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 complet...
2011
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 summar...
Writing Complex Latex Documents with Scrivener 2.1 and MultiMarkDown 3
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).
2010
Should we care about evidence-based software engineering?
Time for some contrariness. The current rage in the academic software research community is evidence-based practice. It’s in popular magazines, desirable in ...