It Will Never Work in Theory

“Extremely angry with the state of academic CS research right now”

Is 40 the New 60?

Here's a funny story: I've been using and teaching Python for over 20 years, and designed its built-in set module, but nobody would hire me as a Python programmer when I was laid off by RStudio in February. I was "too senior" for every developer role I applied for, even when the first paragraph of my cover letter said…

Coverage is not strongly correlated with test suite effectiveness

One of my recent hobby projects was a blocks-based tool for doing basic data science , and I was very pleased when its test suite reached 100% line coverage. However, Inozemtseva2014 found that code coverage is a poor predictor of how effective a test suite is at detecting bugs once the size of the test suite is…

Software Development Waste

I've looked back at the end of every software project I've ever been on and thought, "If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have been done in half the time." Despite this, I've never thought carefully about exactly where all the time went and why so much of it felt wasted.

Software engineering research questions

I have been collecting random software engineering research ideas from friends and colleagues for more than a decade. These are the questions I’ve been asked since I started taking notes ten years ago. I apologize for not keeping track of who wanted to know, but if you’re working on any of these, please get in touch…

Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git

PerezDeRosso2016 Santiago Perez De Rosso and Daniel Jackson: " Purposes, concepts, misfits, and a redesign of git ". Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications , 10.1145/2983990.2984018 .

Too Many Knobs

Xu2015 Tianyin Xu, Long Jin, Xuepeng Fan, Yuanyuan Zhou, Shankar Pasupathy, and Rukma Talwadker: " Hey, you have given me too many knobs!: understanding and dealing with over-designed configuration in system software ". Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering …

What's Wrong with Tech Hiring

I went through a lot of interviews after being laid off by RStudio earlier this year. Some really impressed me---in particular, I think Automattic 's hiring process was excellent---but many were haphazard, confusing, or misguided . I'm not alone in feeling this way: Behroozi2019 found that the questions asked in…

Software projects need heroes? lessons learned from 1100 projects

Reviewed by Greg Wilson / 2021-09-10 Keywords: Code Ownership , Software Projects

Perl is no more accurate than randomly-generated language

IEEE Software is publishing a short retrospective on this project in 2024. A preprint is available on the magazine's site , or you can download a PDF directly.

A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge

There are thousands of books in print today about starting a business, but only a handful about ending one and moving on . Tamburri2020 is a deep dive into one particular (and not yet complete) ending: the decline of SourceForge , which was the first (and for many years the largest) open source software forge. Over…

Mea culpa: How developers fix their own simple bugs differently from other devs

This paper from Zhu and Godfrey looks at single-statement bug fixes in Java code: more specifically, at the differences between how bug are fixed by the people who created them and how they are fixed by other people. The authors found that people fix their own bugs more quickly than other people's, which falls under…