11:00 - 11:10

NIER'15 Best  Paper Award

11:10 - 11:30

• New Initiative: The Naturalness of Software

  This paper describes a new research consortium, studying the Naturalness of Software. This initiative is supported by a pair of grants by the US National Science Foundation, totaling $2,600,000: the first, exploratory (“EAGER”) grant of $600,000 helped kickstart an inter-disciplinary effort, and demonstrate feasibility; a follow-on full grant of $2,000,000 was recently awarded. The initiative is led by the author, who is at UC Davis, and includes investigators from Iowa State University and Carnegie-Mellon University (Language Technologies Institute).

   

  Preprint available:

Premkumar Devanbu

University of California at Davis, USA

11:30 - 11:50

• Virtual Reality in Software Engineering: Affordances, Applications, and Challenges

  Software engineers primarily interact with source code using a keyboard and mouse, and typically view software on a small number of 2D monitors. This interaction paradigm does not take advantage of many affordances of natural human movement and perception. Virtual reality (VR) can use these affordances more fully than existing developer environments to enable new creative opportunities and potentially result in higher productivity, lower learning curves, and increased user satisfaction. This paper describes the affordances offered by VR, demonstrates the benefits of VR and software engineering in prototypes for live coding and code review, and discusses future work, open questions, and the challenges of VR.

   

  Preprint available:

Anthony Elliott; Brian Peiris; Chris Parnin

North Carolina State University, USA

11:50 - 12:10

• CodeAware: Sensor-Based Fine-Grained Monitoring and Management of Software Artifacts

  Current continuous integration (CI) tools, although extensible, can be limiting in terms of flexibility. In particular, artifact analysis capabilities available through plug in mechanisms are both coarse-grained and centralized. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a new paradigm, Code Aware, for distributed and fine-grained artifact analysis. Code Aware is an ecosystem inspired by sensor networks, consisting of monitors and actuators, aimed at improving code quality and team productivity. Code ware's vision entails (a) the ability to probe software artifacts of any granularity and localization, from variables to classes or files to entire systems, (b) the ability to perform both static and dynamic analyses on these artifacts, and (c) the ability to describe targeted remediation actions, for example to notify interested developers, through automated actuators. We provide motivational examples for the use of Code Aware that leverage current CI solutions, sketch the architecture of its underlying ecosystem, and outline research challenges.

   

  Preprint available:

Rui Abreu; Hakan Erdogmus; Alexandre Perez

University of Porto, Portugal; Carnegie Mellon University, USA

12:10 - 12:20

• Free Hugs - Praising Developers for Their Actions

  Developing software is a complex, intrinsically intellectual, and therefore ephemeral activity, also due to the intangible nature of the end product, the source code. There is a thin red line between a productive development session, where a developer actually does something useful and productive, and a session where the developer essentially produces "fried air", pieces of code whose quality and usefulness are doubtful at best. We believe that well-thought mechanisms of gamification built on fine-grained interaction information mined from the IDE can crystallize and reward good coding behavior. We present our preliminary experience with the design and implementation of a micro-gamification layer built into an object-oriented IDE, which at the end of each development session not only helps the developer to understand what he actually produced, but also praises him in case the development session was productive. Building on this, we envision an environment where the IDE reflects on the deeds of the developers and by providing a historical view also helps to track and reward long-term growth in terms of development skills, not dissimilar from the mechanics of role-playing games.

   

  Preprint available:

Roberto Minelli; Andrea Mocci; Michele Lanza

University of Lugano, Switzerland

12:20 - 12:30

• How (Much) Do Developers Test?

  What do we know about software testing in the real world? It seems we know from Fred Brooks' seminal work "The Mythical Man-Month" that 50% of project effort is spent on testing. However, due to the enormous advances in software engineering in the past 40 years, the question stands: Is this observation still true? In fact, was it ever true? The vision for our research is to settle the discussion about Brooks' estimation once and for all: How much do developers test? Does developers' estimation on how much they test match reality? How frequently do they execute their tests, and is there a relationship between test runtime and execution frequency? What are the typical reactions to failing tests? Do developers solve actual defects in the production code, or do they merely relax their test assertions? Emerging results from 40 software engineering students show that students overestimate their testing time threefold, and 50% of them test as little as 4% of their time, or less. Having proven the scalability of our infrastructure, we are now extending our case study with professional software engineers from open-source and industrial organizations.

   

  Preprint available:

Moritz Beller; Georgios Gousios; Andy Zaidman

TU Delft, Netherlands