Software Changes and Software Engineering

ATTENTION: THIS WEB SITE HAS MOVED. The pages you are looking at are no longer being maintained. Please go to http://www.poly.edu/cis/ to visit the new site of the Department of Computer and Information Science at Polytechnic University.
Software Changes and Software Engineering

David M. Weiss

Director, Software Technology Research, Avaya Labs

Friday, Apr 1., 11:00am
LC 102, Brooklyn Campus, Polytechnic University

Abstract

Software systems are changed constantly throughout their lifetime. Understanding relationships between different types of changes and the effects of these changes on the success of software projects is essential to making progress in Software Engineering. By using novel methods and tools to retrieve, process, and model data from ubiquitous change management databases at the granularity of Modification Requests (individual changes to software) we have gained insights regarding the relationships between process/product factors and key outcomes, such as, quality, effort, and interval. We exemplify this approach by describing various measures that can be obtained, including developer learning curves. We also present models that relate properties of a change and the likelihood that it will cause a failure when deployed [1], methods that find parts of code that tend to be changed independently [2], and a set of tools that show relationships between developers, organizations and the code they work on [3].

[1] Audris Mockus and David~M. Weiss. Predicting risk of software changes. Bell Labs Technical Journal, 5(2):169--180, April--June 2000. [2] Audris Mockus and David~M. Weiss. Globalization by chunking: a quantitative approach. IEEE Software, 18(2):30--37, March 2001. [3] Audris Mockus and James Herbsleb. Expertise browser: A quantitative approach to identifying expertise. In 2002 International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 503--512, Orlando, Florida, May 19-25 2002. ACM Press.

Bio

David M. Weiss received the B.S. degree in Mathematics in 1964 from Union College, and the M.S. in Computer Science in 1974 and the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981 from the University of Maryland. He is currently the head of the Software Technology Research Department at Avaya Laboratories, and is looking into the problem of how to improve the effectiveness of software development in general and of Avaya's software development processes in particular. In this capacity he heads the Avaya Resource Center for Software Technology. For more information please contact Phyllis Frankl (pfrankl at duke.poly.edu)