The document discusses ways for software engineering research to have impact. It recommends focusing on real-world problems, being open to opportunities, collaborating, adapting, and being generous with one's work. The document cautions against only focusing on "home runs", putting research above people, thinking innovation only happens in academia, ignoring issues of scale, relying only on open source, and neglecting the importance of messaging. It then describes Gail Murphy's career which exemplifies these principles through her academic works on Reflexion Models and Hipikat and her role in founding Tasktop to commercialize the Mylar technology, demonstrating impacts across multiple domains.

1. Impactful SE Research:
Some Do’s
and More Don’ts
Gail C. Murphy
University of British Columbia
Tasktop Technologies Inc.
@gail_murphy

2. “software is eating
the world”
Marc Andreesen

3. IMPACT
3

4. Multiple Paths to Impact
€ Economic
Ý Social
Ħ Policy
á People
! Academic

5. Do
•understand and use the
real problem as a
beacon
•be open to
opportunities
•continually listen
•collaborate
•adapt
•be generous
•approach problems
with integrity
Don’t
•focus only on home runs
•put the research ahead
of the people
•think innovation only
happens in academia
•think scale doesn’t
matter
•think open source is
enough
•think the message
doesn’t matter

6. Do
•understand and use the
real problem as a
beacon
•be open to
opportunities
•continually listen
•collaborate
•adapt
•be generous
•approach problems
with integrity
Don’t
•focus only on home runs
•put the research ahead
of the people
•think innovation only
happens in academia
•think scale doesn’t
matter
•think open source is
enough
•think the message
doesn’t matter

7. Who Should
Fix This
Bug?
7
Mylar
Story
Hipikat
Four Stories
PhD:
Reflexion
Models

8. Who Should
Fix This
Bug?
8
Mylar
Story
Hipikat
Reflexion
Models
A story about
academic and
social impact
and openness
to opportunity
PhD:
Reflexion
Models

9. A bit of background
B.Sc.
Computing
Science
"♀
Software
Developer
(5 years)
!
Grad
School
(U. Washington)

10. Ph.D.: Reflexion Models
Murphy, Notkin & Sullivan, FSE 1995. SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Award.

11. Goals
•Lightweight
• Apply to a large system in < 30 minutes
•Flexible
• Multiple kinds of source, relationships between ‘modules’
•Human-centric
• Provide information to human in human’s terms

12. I got lost
12

13. Reflexion Models for Excel
File
Sheet
Graph

14. Reflexion Models for Excel
Graph
Sheet
File
0
36734
912
1210
...
...

15. Reflexion Models: Take-aways
•Focus on the problem
• Understanding the implementation
•Notkin guidance
• “Your Ph.D. doesn’t have to be a home run”
• “It is the start of your career and life’s work not the end”
•Openness to opportunity
• Be ready to pitch
• Not the perfect case study but lots of good aspects
Ý Social! Academic

16. Who Should
Fix This
Bug?
16
Mylar
Story
PhD:
Reflexion
Models
Hipikat
Hipikat
A story about
academic impact
and the need
for scale

17. Hipikat
• Context:
• The best information about a development is in the heads of the
developers’
• Hypothesis:
• Pertinent artifacts to a task can be recommended from a latent group
memory formed from digital assets recorded as part of the development
• Prototype:
• Built a latent group memory automatically from repository information,
mailing lists, etc.
• Evaluation:
• Wizard-of-oz, controlled lab studies, simulation studies
Çubranić and Murphy, ICSE 2003. Ten year ICSE impact award.

18. Hipikat in Action

19. Hipikat in Action

20. Building Hipikat
• Collaboration with IBM when Eclipse was in development
• Likely first academic plug-in built for Eclipse
• IBM personnel participated in lab studies, increasing validity
• Lots of hiccups to overcome
• New development environment and architecture
• Constant upgrading at IBM to be on the latest

21. Hipikat: Take-aways
• Collaboration as an enabler
• Joint collaboration with industry partner
• Scale matters
• Eclipse presented itself as an opportunity we acted upon
• Messages matter
• Hipikat is still first in Google search
• The water cooler description always did and still resonates
• Research can push policy boundaries
• What was ethical to use from open source development?
! Academic á PeopleĦ Policy

22. Who Should
Fix This
Bug?
22
Mylar
Story
PhD:
Reflexion
Models
Hipikat
Who Should
Fix This Bug?
A story about
academic impact
and first base
can be enough

23. Who Should Fix This Bug?
• Problem:
• Lots of issues filed in open source
• How to reduce the effort and costs of triaging the bugs
• Proposed solution:
• Use supervised machine learning to learn triage results, like who
should fix a particular bug, which component the bug should be filed
against, etc.
• Evaluation:
• Applied against a few open source systems
• My favourite review comment: “academically honest” because we
explained where it didn’t work
Anvik, Murphy and Hiew, ICSE 2006. Ten-year ICSE impact award.

24. A problem before its time
• We cared about how hard it would be to apply the machine
learning approach to a new system
• Semi-automated configuration of machine learning approach
was important to us for approach to be usable
• At least 1/2 of John Anvik’s thesis was this semi-automated
configuration
• Hard to publish because the problem wasn’t understood (and we
didn’t explain well enough)
• We persevered

25. Who Should Fix This Bug: Take-aways
• Messages matter
• The title captured attention
• Integrity is important
• Outlining context where something works and where it does not is
valuable
• “First base” can be enough
• We opened a new area more than solving a problem completely
• Sometimes impact is not where you expect
• Would I have predicted this as the most-cited paper from the group?
! Academic á People

26. Who Should
Fix This
Bug?
26
Mylar
Story
PhD:
Reflexion
Models
Hipikat
The Mylar/
Tasktop
A story about
academic and
industrial
impact

27. TIMELINE
2004 Mylar
Information Overload
Mylar
See only what you’re working
27

28. TIMELINE
28
2007 Tasktop
Mik Kersten
Rob Elves
3 Co-founders
Gail Murphy
Shawn
Minto
Leo Dos
Santos
2 Staff
2004 Mylar

29. TIMELINE
29
2017 Tasktop
2004 Mylar
43 of the Fortune 100

30. Mylar Highlights: 2004-2007
2004
2004
2005
2005
2005-06
2007
Mylar invention & innovation
1st industrial trial at IBM Toronto
1st academic publication
EclipseCon/Field Study/Eclipse project
Company discussions; biz competitions
Mik’s Ph.D. Friday; incorporate Monday
IBM
Trial
Publication
Murphy and Kersten, AOSD 2006. Ten-year Modularity impact award.

31. Mylar Highlights: 2004-2007
2004
2004
2005
2005
2005-06
2007
Mylar invention & innovation
1st industrial trial at IBM Toronto
1st academic publication
EclipseCon/Field Study/Eclipse project
Company discussions; biz competitions
Mik’s Ph.D. Friday; incorporate Monday
IBM
Trial
Publication
Robustness
&
community
building
Murphy and Kersten, AOSD 2006. Ten-year Modularity impact award.

32. Mylar Highlights: 2004-2007
2004
2004
2005
2005
2005-06
2007
Mylar invention & innovation
1st industrial trial at IBM Toronto
1st academic publication
EclipseCon/Field Study/Eclipse project
Company discussions; biz competitions
Mik’s Ph.D. Friday; incorporated Monday
IBM
Trial
Publication
Murphy and Kersten, AOSD 2006. Ten-year Modularity impact award.

33. 2007
2008
2009
2011
2014
2015-17
Mylar becomes Eclipse Mylyn
Tasktop Dev
Tasktop Dev - Enterprise sales
Tasktop Sync
$11M Series A funding
Tasktop Data & Gateway capabilities
Eclipse Mylyn
Various innovations
Mylyn/Tasktop Highlights: 2007-2016

34. 2007
2008
2009
2011
2014
2015-16
Mylar becomes Eclipse Mylyn
Tasktop Dev
Tasktop Dev - Enterprise sales
Tasktop Sync
$11M Series A funding
Tasktop Data & Gateway capabilities
Eclipse Mylyn
Various innovations
Mylyn/Tasktop Highlights: 2007-2016

35. 2007
2008
2009
2011
2014
2015-16
Mylar becomes Eclipse Mylyn
Tasktop Dev
Tasktop Dev - Enterprise sales
Tasktop Sync
$11M Series A funding
Tasktop Data & Gateway capabilities
Eclipse Mylyn
Various innovations
Mylyn/Tasktop Highlights: 2007-2016

36. 2007
2008
2009
2011
2014
2015-16
Mylar becomes Eclipse Mylyn
Tasktop Dev
Tasktop Dev - Enterprise sales
Tasktop Sync
$11M Series A funding
Tasktop Data & Gateway capabilities
Eclipse Mylyn
Various innovationsVarious
inventions
Mylyn/Tasktop Highlights: 2007-2016

37. 2007
2008
2009
2011
2014
2015-16
Mylar becomes Eclipse Mylyn
Tasktop Dev
Tasktop Dev - Enterprise sales
Tasktop Sync
$11M Series A funding
Tasktop Data & Gateway capabilities
Eclipse Mylyn
Various innovationsVarious
inventions
Mylyn/Tasktop Highlights: 2007-2016

38. 2007
2008
2009
2011
2014
2015-16
Mylar becomes Eclipse Mylyn
Tasktop Dev
Tasktop Dev - Enterprise sales
Tasktop Sync
$11M Series A funding
Tasktop Data & Gateway capabilities
Eclipse Mylyn
Various innovationsVarious
inventions
Continual
innovation &
incremental
validation
Mylyn/Tasktop Highlights: 2007-2016
2017: $11M Series B Funding
2017: Tasktop Integration Hub

39. Robustness
&
community
building
Continual
innovation &
incremental
validation

40. Mylar/Tasktop: Take-aways
•Collaboration
• With Mik Kersten, with open source community, with
Tasktopians, with industry partners, with customers …
•Adaptability
• Pivot to Tasktop Sync
•Open source takes work
• Tasktop supports Mylyn community
!Academic € Economic á People

41. Who Should
Fix This
Bug?
41
Mylar
Story
Hipikat
PhD:
Reflexion
Models

42. 42
Thanks to…
Mylar + Early Tasktop:
Tasktopians circa 2013
Mik Kersten, Rob Elves, Shawn Minto, Davor Cubranic, Taivo Evard, Nathan Hapke,
Wesley Coelho, Meghan Allen, Leo Dos Santos, Steffen Pingel
Collaborators:
David Notkin, Kevin Sullivan,
Davor Çubranić, John
Anvik, Lyndon Hiew

43. Who Should
Fix This
Bug?
43
Mylar
Story
Hipikat
PhD:
Reflexion
Models
Academic
Social
People
Academic
People
Academic
{Policy}
People
Academic
Social
Economic
People
Impacts

44. Multiple Paths to Impact
€ Economic
Ý Social
Ħ Policy
á People
! Academic

45. Do
•understand and use
the real problem as a
beacon
•be open to
opportunities
•continually listen
•collaborate
•adapt
•be generous
•be a great academic
Don’t
•focus only on home runs
•put the research ahead
of the people
•think innovation only
happens in academia
•think scale doesn’t
matter
•think open source is
enough
•think the message
doesn’t matter
At the start of the talk…

46. All in terms of “Do”s
•understand and use
the real problem as a
beacon
•be open to
opportunities
•continually listen
•collaborate
•adapt
•be generous
•be a great academic
•focus on the problem at
hand
•see the value in people in
your network
•follow innovations in
industry
•consider whether scale
matters
•realize open source
requires effort
•spend time on the
message

47. Impact can take many forms
Gail C. Murphy
University of British Columbia
Tasktop Technologies Inc. @gail_murphy
Focus on the problem
Be open to possibilities
Think outside the box
Do research with integrity