08:30 - 09:00

• Are Students Representatives of Professionals in Software Engineering Experiments?

  Background: Most of the experiments in software engineering (SE) employ students as subjects. This raises concerns about the realism of the results acquired through students and adaptability of the results to software industry. Aim: We compare students and professionals to understand how well students represent professionals as experimental subjects in SE research. Method: The comparison was made in the context of two test-driven development experiments conducted with students in an academic setting and with professionals in a software organization. We measured the code quality of several tasks implemented by both subject groups and checked whether students and professionals perform similarly in terms of code quality metrics. Results: Except for minor differences, neither of the subject groups is better than the other. Professionals produce larger, yet less complex, methods when they use their traditional development approach, whereas both subject groups perform similarly when they apply a new approach for the first time. Conclusion: Given a carefully scoped experiment on a development approach that is new to both students and professionals, similar performances are observed. Further investigation is necessary to analyze the effects of subject demographics and level of experience on the results of SE experiments.

Iflaah Salman; Ayse Tosun Misirli; Natalia Juristo

University of Oulu, Finland; Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

09:00 - 09:30

• Why Good Developers Write Bad Code: An Observational Case Study of the Impacts of Organizational Factors on Software Quality

  How can organizational factors such as structure and culture have an impact on the working conditions of developers? This study is based on ten months of observation of an in-house software development project within a large telecommunications company. The observation was conducted during mandatory weekly status meetings, where technical and managerial issues were raised and discussed. Preliminary results show that many decisions made under the pressure of certain organizational factors negatively affected software quality. This paper describes cases depicting the complexity of organizational factors and reports on ten issues that have had a negative impact on quality, followed by suggested avenues for corrective action.

   

  Preprint available:

Mathieu Lavallee; Pierre N. Robillard

École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada

09:30 - 10:00

• Stuck and Frustrated or in Flow and Happy: Sensing Developers’ Emotions and Progress

  Software developers working on change tasks commonly experience a broad range of emotions, ranging from happiness all the way to frustration and anger. Research, primarily in psychology, has shown that for certain kinds of tasks, emotions correlate with progress and that biometric measures, such as electro-dermal activity and electroencephalography data, might be used to distinguish between emotions. In our research, we are building on this work and investigate developers' emotions, progress and the use of biometric measures to classify them in the context of software change tasks. We conducted a lab study with 17 participants working on two change tasks each. Participants were wearing three biometric sensors and had to periodically assess their emotions and progress. The results show that the wide range of emotions experienced by developers is correlated with their perceived progress on the change tasks. Our analysis also shows that we can build a classifier to distinguish between positive and negative emotions in 71.36% and between low and high progress in 67.70% of all cases. These results open up opportunities for improving a developer's productivity. For instance, one could use such a classifier for providing recommendations at opportune moments when a developer is stuck and making no progress.

  Preprint available: 

Sebastian C. Müller; Thomas Fritz

University of Zurich, Switzerland

10:00 - 10:30

• What Makes a Great Software Engineer?

  Good software engineers are essential to the creation of good software. However, most of what we know about software-engineering expertise are vague stereotypes, such as 'excellent communicators' and 'great teammates'. The lack of specificity in our understanding hinders researchers from reasoning about them, employers from identifying them, and young engineers from becoming them. Our understanding also lacks breadth: what are all the distinguishing attributes of great engineers (technical expertise and beyond)? We took a first step in addressing these gaps by interviewing 59 experienced engineers across 13 divisions at Microsoft, uncovering 53 attributes of great engineers. We explain the attributes and examine how the most salient of these impact projects and teams. We discuss implications of this knowledge on research and the hiring and training of engineers.

  Preprint available: 

Paul L. Li; Andrew J. Ko; Jiamin Zhu

University of Washington, USA; Microsoft, USA