Position Statement at the Symposium on Engineering Complex Software Systems, January 8, 2014

1. software evolution & architecture lab
Actionable SE
A Position Statement
Harald Gall
University of Zurich, Switzerland
http://seal.ifi.uzh.ch
@ ECSS Symposium, Luxembourg, 08 Jan 2014

2. Actionable State of the Art?
‣ Credible answers to fundamental SE problems!
‣
technical (conceptual art)
‣
empirical (modern art)
‣
economical (contemporary art)
‣
social (romanticism)
‣
psychological (impressionism)
!
‣
.. featuring the
interdisciplinary
nature of SE!

3. 1’000’000 $ Contest:!
Improve Movie Predictions
Example: MSRconf.org

4. Example: Computation & Economics
‣ Interplay between economic thinking and
computational thinking as it relates to
‣ e-commerce, social networks, collective intelligence,
networked systems
‣ game theory, market mechanism design, p2p filesharing, auctions, behavioral economics, human
computation, crowdsourcing, social choice, prediction
markets, reputation systems, recommender systems,
social networks, network dynamics, electronic
currency systems…

5. Example: Code Ownership
C. Bird, N. Nagappan, B. Murphy, H. Gall, P Devanbu, Don't touch my code!
Examining the effects of ownership on software quality, ESEC/FSE ’11

6. Actionable Findings
‣ “Changes made by minor contributors should
be reviewed with more scrutiny.”
‣ “Potential minor contributors should
communicate desired changes to developers
experienced with the respective binary.”
‣ “Components with low ownership should be
given priority by QA.”
C. Bird, N. Nagappan, B. Murphy, H. Gall, P Devanbu, Don't touch my code!
Examining the effects of ownership on software quality, ESEC/FSE ’11

7. Actionable & Tailored
‣ We need to tailor information to the information
needs of stakeholders, such as developers,
testers, project managers, or quality analysts
‣
study their needs beyond typical developer needs
‘questions developers ask’ by Sillito et al.)
‣
devise prototypes to elicit that
information needs, for example,
SQA-Mashup for Integrating
Quality Data

8. SQA Mashup Teaser

9. Mashup: A Developer’s view

10. Mashup: A Tester’s view

11. Mashup: A project’s timeline

12. Where to go from here?
‣ Goal Question Action Metrics :-)
‣ User-centered stakeholder-tailored multi-source
multi-device mashups
‣ Actionable & tailored
!
‣ Good News:
‣ lots of open questions!
‣ NIER or ERA papers to start off