seal @ ICSME 2017

We are very happy to announce that our research group got two papers accepted at ICSME 2017 in Shanghai, China.

The first paper is entitled “A Tale of CI Build Failures: an Open Source and a Financial Organization Perspective” and was written in collaboration with ING Nederland, University of Sannio and TU Delft. The authors of the paper are: Carmine Vassallo, Gerald Schermann, Fiorella Zampetti, Daniele Romano, Philipp Leitner, Andy Zaidman, Massimiliano Di Penta and Sebastiano Panichella.

Abstract: Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are widespread in both industrial and open-source software (OSS) projects. Recent research characterized build failures in CI and identified factors potentially correlated to them. However, most observations and findings of previous work are exclusively based on OSS projects or data from a single industrial organization. This paper provides a first attempt to compare the CI processes and occurrences of build failures in 349 Java OSS projects and 418 projects from a large financial organization, ING Nederland.

Through the analysis of 34,182 failing builds (26% of the total number of observed builds), we derived a taxonomy of failures that affect the observed CI processes. Using cluster analysis, we observed that in some cases OSS and ING projects share similar build failure patterns (e.g., few compilation failures as compared to frequent testing failures), while in other cases completely different patterns emerge. In short, we explain how OSS and ING CI processes exhibit commonalities, yet are substantially different in their design and in the failures they report.

 

The second accepted paper is entitled “Towards Activity-Aware Tool Support for Change Tasks” and was written by Katja Kevic and Thomas Fritz.

Abstract: To complete a change task, software developers perform a number of activities, such as locating and editing the relevant code. While there is a variety of approaches to support developers for change tasks, these approaches mainly focus on a single activity each. Given the wide variety of activities during a change task, a developer has to keep track of and switch a lot between the different approaches.

By knowing more about a developer’s activities and in particular by knowing when she is working on which activity, we would be able to provide better and more tailored tool support, thereby reducing developer effort. In our research we investigate the characteristics of these activities, whether they can be identified, and whether we can use this additional information to improve developer support for change tasks. We conducted two exploratory studies with a total of 21 software developers collecting data on activities in the lab and field. An empirical analysis of the data shows, amongst other results, that activities comprise a consistently small amount of code elements across all developers and tasks (approx. 8.7 elements). Further analysis of the data shows, that we can automatically detect the boundaries and types of activities, and that the information on activity types can be used to improve the identification of relevant code elements.

 

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Survey on Release Processes

We are currently conducting a study on modern release processes and we want invite you to participate in our survey. Our goal is to obtain a better understanding of how practices often associated with Continuous Delivery are used in industry.

The survey will take approximately 7-9 minutes.
This is the link to the survey: https://sealuzh.typeform.com/to/k6SR2t

With your participation, you get the chance to enter in our lottery to win one of two 50$ Amazon Gift Cards at the end of the survey.

We will handle all responses confidentially and anonymize all collected data before publishing it. We will not attribute answers to any particular participant. At the end of the survey, you may provide your email address voluntarily if you wish to participate in the lottery and/or in case you wish to be notified about the survey results.

We would greatly appreciate your participation! Thank you!

Please feel free to contact Gerald Schermann if you have any further questions.

Blogpost: Using Biometrics to Assess Developers

We summarized our research on using biometrics to assess developers’ cognitive and emotional states in a blogpost on the IEEE Software blog. Check out the blogpost: http://blog.ieeesoftware.org/2016/01/using-biometrics-to-assess-developers.html

seal @ ICSE 2016

We are very happy to announce that our research group got two papers and a technical briefing accepted at ICSE 2016 in Austin, Texas.

The first accepted paper entitled “The Impact of Test Case Summaries on Bug Fixing Performance: An Empirical Investigation” was written in collaboration with the University of Delft. The authors of the paper are : Sebastiano Panichella, Annibale Panichella, Moritz Beller, Andy Zaidman and Harald Gall.

Abstract: “Automated test generation tools have been widely investigated with the goal of reducing the cost of testing activities. However, generated tests have been shown not to help developers in detecting and finding more bugs even though they reach higher structural coverage compared to manual testing. The main reason is that generated tests are difficult to understand and maintain.

Our paper proposes an approach which automatically generates test case summaries of the portion of code exercised by each individual test, thereby improving understandability. We argue that this approach can complement the current techniques around automated unit test generation or search-based techniques designed to generate a possibly minimal set of test cases. In evaluating our approach we found that (1) developers find twice as many bugs, and (2) test case summaries significantly improve the comprehensibility of test cases, which is considered particularly useful by developers.”

A preprint of the paper can be found online.

The second paper is entitled “Using (Bio)Metrics to Predict Code Quality Online” and was written by Sebastian Müller and Thomas Fritz. The paper investigates the use of biometrics, such as heart rate variability (HRV) or electro-dermal activity (EDA) to determine the difficulty that developers experience while working on real world change tasks and automatically identify code quality concerns while a developer is making a change to the code.

A preprint of the paper will be available soon.

Additionally, we had a technical briefing on “Using Docker Containers to Improve Reproducibility in Software Engineering Research”, by Jürgen Cito and Harald Gall, accepted, where we will present opportunities to aid reproducibility to the SE community.

Paper accepted for ICPC ’15

We are excited to announce that out paper “Discovering Loners and Phantoms in Commit and Issue Data” has been accepted for the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2015) in Florence, Italy.

The interlinking of commit and issue data has become a de-facto standard in software development. Modern issue tracking systems, such as JIRA, automatically interlink commits and issues by the extraction of identifiers (e.g., issue key) from commit messages. However, the conventions for the use of interlinking methodologies vary between software projects. For example, some projects enforce the use of identifiers for every commit while others have less restrictive conventions. In this work, we introduce a model called PaLiMod (Partial Linking Model) to enable the analysis of interlinking characteristics in commit and issue data. We surveyed 15 Apache projects to investigate differences and commonalities between linked and non-linked commits and issues (RQ1). Based on the gathered information, we created a set of heuristics to interlink the residual of non-linked commits and issues (RQ2).

We observed that in the majority of the analyzed projects, the number of commits linked to issues is higher than the number of commits without link. On average, 74% of commits are linked to issues and 50% of the issues have associated commits. Based on the survey data, we identified two interlinking characteristics which we call Loners (one commit, one issue) and Phantoms (multiple commits, one issue). For these two characteristics, we proposed heuristics to automatically interlink non-linked commit and issue data. The evaluation results showed that our approach can achieve an overall precision of 96% with a recall of 92% in case of the Loner heuristic and an overall precision of 73% with a recall of 53% in case of the Phantom heuristic.

The results of our evaluation indicate that the proposed PaLiMod model and heuristics enable an automatic interlinking and can indeed reduce the residual of non-linked commits and issues in software projects.

“Would Static Analysis Tools Help Developers with Code Reviews?” accepted for SANER ’15

Our paper “Would Static Analysis Tools Help Developers with Code Reviews?” has been accepted as full research paper for the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering in Montreal, Canada.

Paper Accepted for SANER’15

Our paper “SQA-Profiles: Rule-based Activity Profiles for Continuous Integration Environments” has has been accepted as full research paper for the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering in Montreal, Canada.

More information about the approach is available on the project’s website: http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/seal/people/brandtner/projects/sqa-profiles.html

ESSENTIALS – People-Centric Essentials for Software Evolution

New project “ESSENTIALS – People-Centric Essentials for Software Evolution” was accepted by the SNF / www.snf.ch. The project is in collaboration with Prof. Michele Lanza from the University of Lugano (USI) and will fund 4 PhD students.

Assessing Task Difficulty in Software Development

Knowing how hard a software development task is as it is being performed can be helpful for many reasons. For instance, the estimate for completing a task might be revised or the likelihood of a bug occurring the source code might be predicted. Furthermore, a real time task difficulty classification could be used to stop software developers when they experience difficulties and prevent them from introducing bugs into the code.