Born to be geek! -- Uax2023-01-05T18:15:16+01:00http://herraiz.org/blog/tags/uax/Israel Herraizisra@herraiz.orgData for Mining Software Repositories2010-06-25T00:00:00+02:00http://herraiz.org/blog/2010/06/25/data-for-mining-software-repositories<p>
Last week, <a href="http://www.cc.uah.es/drg/index.html">Daniel RodrÃguez (Information Engineering Research Unit, UAH)</a>
visited our department to talk about how to start to collaborate in
the field Mining Software Repositories, where to get data, what topics
we could do join works on. I prepared a set of slides with practical
information about datasets, conferences and journals, to be used as a
facilitator for discussion. The slides are <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/herraiz/20100618-daniel-uah">available in SlideShare</a>:
</p>
<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_4610593"><strong
style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px"><a
href="http://www.slideshare.net/herraiz/20100618-daniel-uah"
title="Mining Software Repositories">Mining Software
Repositories</a></strong><object id="__sse4610593" width="425"
height="355"><param name="movie"
value="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=20100618danieluah-100625042332-phpapp02&stripped_title=20100618-daniel-uah"
/><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param
name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><embed name="__sse4610593"
src="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=20100618danieluah-100625042332-phpapp02&stripped_title=20100618-daniel-uah"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><div
style="padding:5px 0 12px">View more <a
href="http://www.slideshare.net/">presentations</a> from <a
href="http://www.slideshare.net/herraiz">Israel
Herraiz</a>.</div></div>
<p>
The presentation contains some links to datasets that can be easily
used for empirical studies, and that makes it possible to conduct
replicable studies. Also, there is paper at MSR 2010 that describes
the data sources used for the <a href="http://msr.uwaterloo.ca/msr2010/challenge/">MSR Challenge</a>; the paper is entitled
<a href="http://herraiz.org/papers/english/challenge-msr2010.pdf">Mining Challenge 2010: FreeBSD, GNOME Desktop and Debian/Ubuntu</a> and
contains description of the FreeBSD repositories, of
<a href="http://flossmetrics.org">FLOSSMetrics data about GNOME</a> and of the
<a href="http://udd.debian.org/">Ultimate Debian Database</a>. If you use the paper for your research,
please consider citing it
(<a href="http://herraiz.org/bibtex/english/challenge-msr2010.txt">download the BibTeX citation as text file</a>):
</p>
<div class="org-src-container">
<pre class="src src-bibtex">@InProceedings{challenge_msr2010,
author = {Abram Hindle
and Israel Herraiz
and Emad Shihab
and Zheng Ming Jiang},
title = {Mining {C}hallenge 2010:
{F}ree{BSD}, {GNOME} {D}esktop
and {D}ebian/{U}buntu},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the
7th IEEE International Working Conference
on Mining Software Repositories},
pages = {82--85},
year = {2010},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
}
</pre>
</div>
The eye of the tiger: agile methods vs. architecture2010-06-21T00:00:00+02:00http://herraiz.org/blog/2010/06/21/the-eye-of-the-tiger-agile-methods-vs-architecture<p>
As part of the course on Software Engineering that I teach at <a href="http://www.uax.es">UAX</a>, we
engaged in a research review and debate about how can agile methods
and architecture coexist, and which one is better for particular
cases.
</p>
<p>
To prepare the debate, we read a set of papers, most of them from IEEE
Software, about software architectures and agile methods. From the
list of papers that I preselected, the students decided to read the
following:
</p>
<ul class="org-ul">
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5076468&tag=1">Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5420792">Peaceful Coexistence: Agile Developer Perspectives on Software Architecture</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5420797&tag=1">Collaboration Tools for Global Software Engineering</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=965816">Extreme programming: the good, the bad, and the bottom line</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=965801">Using extreme programming in a maintenance environment</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5204065">Architecture As Language</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5383344">Architects as Service Providers</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=965798">Extreme programming from a CMM perspective</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=965799">Launching extreme programming at a process-intensive company</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1009175">The agile methods fray</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5420791">Agility and Architecture: Can They Coexist?</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
We also read a IEEE Spectrum's paper about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File">Virtual Case File</a>, a
(in)famous example of software project that failed, partly because of
the lack of flexibility that agile methods foster:
</p>
<ul class="org-ul">
<li><a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/who-killed-the-virtual-case-file">Who Killed the Virtual Case File?</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
The debate was quite intense, and we finally ended up concluding that
there is no silver bullet, sometimes it is better to use agile
methods, sometimes it is not, and it is always good to know that there
are different approaches to software development, and that new
projects should be faced without prejudices. I also tried to highlight
that software development is a social activity, and that code,
documentation, etc, are all important, but it is even more important
to be open to the rest of people, and to communicate with the rest of
the team.
</p>
<p>
I am very happy with the results, everybody enjoyed the activity, and
I am very glad that they all read so many papers in English (being
most of them Spanish, and one French), with a critical look, and using
them as arguments for the debate. We also "discovered" the IEEE
Software magazine, and other sources of information, that are
available to anyone through the institutional suscription of the
university, and that contain very useful practical information for
the software professionals that they will soon become.
</p>