seal @ ICSME 2017
We are very happy to announce that our research group got two papers accepted at ICSME 2017 in Shanghai, China.
The first paper is entitled “A Tale of CI Build Failures: an Open Source and a Financial Organization Perspective” and was written in collaboration with ING Nederland, University of Sannio and TU Delft. The authors of the paper are: Carmine Vassallo, Gerald Schermann, Fiorella Zampetti, Daniele Romano, Philipp Leitner, Andy Zaidman, Massimiliano Di Penta and Sebastiano Panichella.
Abstract: Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are widespread in both industrial and open-source software (OSS) projects. Recent research characterized build failures in CI and identified factors potentially correlated to them. However, most observations and findings of previous work are exclusively based on OSS projects or data from a single industrial organization. This paper provides a first attempt to compare the CI processes and occurrences of build failures in 349 Java OSS projects and 418 projects from a large financial organization, ING Nederland.
Through the analysis of 34,182 failing builds (26% of the total number of observed builds), we derived a taxonomy of failures that affect the observed CI processes. Using cluster analysis, we observed that in some cases OSS and ING projects share similar build failure patterns (e.g., few compilation failures as compared to frequent testing failures), while in other cases completely different patterns emerge. In short, we explain how OSS and ING CI processes exhibit commonalities, yet are substantially different in their design and in the failures they report.
The second accepted paper is entitled “ Towards Activity-Aware Tool Support for Change Tasks “ and was written by Katja Kevic and Thomas Fritz.
Abstract: To complete a change task, software developers perform a number of activities, such as locating and editing the relevant code. While there is a variety of approaches to support developers for change tasks, these approaches mainly focus on a single activity each. Given the wide variety of activities during a change task, a developer has to keep track of and switch a lot between the different approaches.
By knowing more about a developer’s activities and in particular by knowing when she is working on which activity, we would be able to provide better and more tailored tool support, thereby reducing developer effort. In our research we investigate the characteristics of these activities, whether they can be identified, and whether we can use this additional information to improve developer support for change tasks. We conducted two exploratory studies with a total of 21 software developers collecting data on activities in the lab and field. An empirical analysis of the data shows, amongst other results, that activities comprise a consistently small amount of code elements across all developers and tasks (approx. 8.7 elements). Further analysis of the data shows, that we can automatically detect the boundaries and types of activities, and that the information on activity types can be used to improve the identification of relevant code elements.
Originally published at http://sealuzh.wordpress.com on July 6, 2017.
