Publications

Pair programming has proven to be a useful technique for developing high quality code while sharing knowledge throughout a team. Rapid global dispersion of software development teams, however, makes co-located pair programming a challenge, motivating the need for development tools tailored specifically for distributed pair programming. Previously, the Sangam Eclipse plug-in was developed to support distributed pair programming. More recently, the Jazz collaborative software development platform was built to support team communication and the sharing of life-cycle resources and to integrate a variety of disparate tools used by team members. We have ported Sangam to the Jazz platform to enable teams to pair program within their integrated team environment. In this paper, we describe Jazz Sangam, highlight the choices that lead to Sangam's current design, and discuss how Jazz Sangam can improve the distributed pair programming experience.

Software fails and fixing it is expensive. Research in failure prediction has been highly successful at modeling software failures. Few models, however, consider the key cause of failures in software: people. Understanding the structure of developer collaboration could explain a lot about the reliability of the final product. We examine this collaboration structure with the developer network derived from code churn information that can predict failures at the file level. We conducted a case study involving a mature Nortel networking product of over three million lines of code. Failure prediction models were developed using test and post-release failure data from two releases, then validated against a subsequent release. One model's prioritization revealed 58% of the failures in 20% of the files compared with the optimal prioritization that would have found 61% in 20% of the files, indicating that a significant correlation exists between file-based developer network metrics and failures.

Open-source project artifacts can be used to inject realism into software engineering courses or lessons on open-source software development. However, the use of open-source projects presents challenges for both educators and for students. Educators must search for projects that meet the constraints of their classes, and often must negotiate the scope and terms of the project with project managers. For students, many available open-source projects have a steep learning curve that inhibits them from making significant contributions to the project and benefiting from a "realistic" experience. To alleviate these problems and to encourage cross-institution collaboration, we have created the Repository for Open Software Education (ROSE) and have contributed three open-source projects intended for an undergraduate computer science or software engineering course. The projects in ROSE are education-friendly in terms of a manageable size and scope, and are intended to be evolved over many semesters. All projects have a set of artifacts covering all aspects of the development process, from requirements, design, code, and test. We invite other educators to contribute to ROSE and to use projects found on ROSE in their own courses. PDF

Traditional approaches to semester-long projects in compiler courses force students to implement the early stages of a compiler in depth; since many students fall behind, they have little opportunity to implement the back end. Consequently, students have a deep knowledge of early material and no knowledge of latter material. We propose an approach based on incremental development and test-driven development; this approach solves the emphasis problem, provides experience with useful tools, and allows for such a course to be taught in a three or four weeks. ACM Reference