The purpose of software engineering research is to figure out how software development works so that the software industry can improve its quality/timeliness (i.e., lower costs and improved customer satisfaction). Research is hampered by the fact that companies are not usually willing to make public good quality data ... [Read more...]

Preface. This is the first of what I hope will be many posts analysing experimental data, that will eventually end up in my empirical software engineering with R book (this experiment was chosen because it happens to be the one I am currently working on; having just switched to using ... [Read more...]

This post provides background information that can be referenced by future posts. For the last 18 months I have been working in fits and starts on a book that has the working title “Empirical Software Engineering with R”. The idea is to provide broad coverage of software engineering issues from an ... [Read more...]

The R language has passed another milestone, a paper aimed at the academic programming language community (or at least one section of this community) has been written about it, Evaluating the Design of the R Language by Morandat, Hill, Osvald and Vitek. Hardly earth shattering news, but it may have ... [Read more...]

Science and engineering are built on theoretical models that are tested against measurements of ‘reality’. Until around 10 years ago there was very little software engineering ‘reality’ publicly available; companies rarely made source available and were generally unforthcoming about any bugs that had been discovered. What happened around 10 years ago was ... [Read more...]