Category: Software Engineering

Benefits of Kanban

, 1

In a recent, well written but smallish study, a team of researchers from Finland have tried to find where KanBan has benefits. In their setup, teams of master students were instructed to use KanBan in their software development projects and then interviewed about their subjective perception of the benefits of…

Continue reading

Experienced Pair Programmers Write Better Code

, 2

According to a recent study by Andreas Höfer, experienced pair programmers write better code than novice pair programmers. This is in line with a study by Hannay et al. from last year where the researchers found that experience was a key performance predictor in pair programming. It is interesting to…

Continue reading

The World Quality Report

, 1

The World Quality Report is the result of ongoing collaboration between Capgemini, Sogeti and HP Software. The report is based on a global survey of more than 1,200 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, IT directors/managers and quality assurance directors/managers from around the world.

My employer publishes a lot of reports on the state of the world as experienced by our customers. One of those are the World Quality Report. Today I had a really interesting and rewarding lunch with one of the experts behind the report!

The Configuration Manager … in Linköping.

, , 3

Picture of one of the entrances to C-huset at Linköping university, Campus Valla

The c-house at Linköping University. ‘LIU im herbst by deruneinholbare, on Flickr.’
Licensed under a Creative Commons License, click on image for details.

I spent last Friday in Linköping. It has been almost 12 years since I was there the last time. This time I came for two reasons: Continue reading

Roles and Architects

0

The issue of the responsibilities of the agile architect versus the software engineer goes towards deep issues with how software is best developed. Having architects easily brings a connotation of a document centric approach where producing documents is more important than producing working code to the benefit of the customer.…

Continue reading

Search based software engineering 10 years

2

Apparently, Search Based Software Engineering or SBSE celebrates 10 years as a research area this year. A bibliometric analysis of 740 contributions was recently published in honor of this landmark. I wonder if my own small contribution is included there? References [bibtex file=http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/greger/tag/20110831a?fieldmap=posted-at:posted-date&clean_urls=0]

Continue reading

Selecting a Requirements Engineering Tool

, 2
Choosing the ring. An oil painting.

Selecting a requirements engineering tool has always been a pain for me. Personally I have had experience with Rational CQ, Rational ReqPro, Jira, CodeBeamer and finally Excel. Requirements Engineering Model I would say that a thorough evaluation of an RE tool starts with your own clear vision of how to…

Continue reading

Applying FixCache to Code Inspections

, 1

Rahman et al. have used a fixcache/bugcache approach to predicting which files should be singled out for code inspection. I have written about using a similair approach for regression test selection (here and here). Their main conclusion is: When used for inspection, FixCache gets most of its power by predicting…

Continue reading

IT Procurement and Requirements

0

How do organizations procure their IT? Do they get what they asked for? Do they get what they need? These questions will be the theme for my attention for a while. Requirements and Acceptance The first thing that came to my mind when I first started discussing these issues with…

Continue reading

Reverse use of GIT bisect

, 0

Here is an interesting post on how to make reverse use of GIT bisect to find fix-introducing commits instead of fault-introducing commits. (The link is broken, but the original post can be found at archive.org.) What it boils down to is this:

Since git bisect was designed to find regressions, we need to flip the meanings of “bad” and “good” in order to use it to find a fix.

It seems to me that using this would be helpful for anyone wanting to use the regression test selection (RTS) method we introduced a few years back.

Check my publications page for more details.

Update 2014-01-01: this reverse use of GIT bisect has recently been covered on stackoverflow.