Docker for Cross-platform Research Prototypes
Something I like about my job in academia, is the freedom with respect to what I work with. When I first started, I chose and configured my own laptop. When ...
Posts by Category
Developer Tools
Just Use My Testing Infrastructure
I use the Maven dependency ecosystem to provide code dependencies to my students via a Maven repository hosted on my group’s artifact page. This gives studen...
Docker
Docker for Cross-platform Research Prototypes
Something I like about my job in academia, is the freedom with respect to what I work with. When I first started, I chose and configured my own laptop. When ...
Getting Things Done
Too Many Things
Back when I was a PhD student, I always had too many™️ projects going on in parallel. There usually were one or two things in my own paper pipeline, a handfu...
ICSE17
Learning Syntactic Program Transformations from Examples
Reudismam Rolim observes that many edits are performed repeatedly, for example, when applying corresponding fixes to multiple locations. Such edits can be ge...
A Dissection of the Test-Driven Development Process: Does It really Matter to Test-First or to Test-Last?
Test-driven development is a testing technique that consists of the three actions “writing a failing test”, “making the test pass with the minimum amount of ...
Precise Condition Synthesis for Program Repair
In test-based program repair, the problem to solve is to take a program with a test suite and at least one failing test, to generate a match that makes the p...
Opportunities in Software Engineering Research for Web API Consumption
Web APIs are a sibling of traditional APIs, but their exact relation remains unclear. Erik Wittern gives an introduction into the problems of current Web API...
Type Checking for Reliable APIs
Maria Kechagia presented her work on improving the usability of APIs via type checking. Her idea is that compiler should take into account statically availab...
WAPI Open Discussion
We concluded the workshop with on open discussion about the different challenges we see and possible next steps for researchers to work on. I tried to captur...
Mining Motivated Trends of Usage of Haskell Libraries
Anand Ashok Sawant presents a preliminary study about why developers migrate between API versions.
Human-Centered Methods for Improving API Usability
Brad Myers gives a wonderful keynote to open the 1st Internation Workshop on API Usage and Evolution (WAPI). He discusses problem space of API design and usa...
API Usage in Descriptions of Source Code Functionality
Paige Rodeghero presents a preliminary experiment and how automatically generated method summaries mention API elements.
On the Role of Fitness Dimensions in API Design Assessment - An Empirical Investigation
Imed Hammouda presents suggests an approach to assess API Design along 23 Fitness Dimensions.
API Evolution and Migration at Google
Hyrum Wright reports on how Google evolves its APIs and manages the migration of its entire codebase to new API versions. He discusses various tradeoffs and ...
To Mock or Not To Mock?
Whenever we write a new piece of software, we have to decide whether we want to test it in its reals context and/or in isolation. The latter case is commonly...
The Unix History Repository: Its creation, contents, and use.
MSR’s keynote is given by Diomidis Spinellis about the Unix History Repository. Unix is very large system originating from the Bell Laboratories. Many ideas ...
An Empirical Analysis on the Docker Container Ecosystem on Github
Docker containers power the infrastructure of modern deployments. Docker quickly became a de-facto standard in industry and made lightweight virtualization a...
Travis Torrent Mining Challenge
Travis is a free-of-charge continuous integration service tightly integrated with GitHub. Travis Torrent is a dataset containing build data about 1.200 Java ...
Research Infrastructure for MSR: Needs, Wants, and Where We Are
Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is an important research direction in the software engineering area. Today, researchers are exploring not only traditional...
Predicting Likelihood of Requirement Implementation within the Planned Iteration
The work was motivated by IBM’s desire to predict whether a feature would make it in the planned iteration. The work builds on previous work that predicts co...
Extracting Code Segments and Their Descriptions from Research Articles
Code examples from various source, such as StackOverflow or documentation, have been explored to support goals such as code recommendation, comment generatio...
Learning
The Programmer Peculiarity
Most people cannot construct a building or write a book, yet, it seems like everybody can program. Isn’t that peculiar?
I Teach, So I Learn
“If you light a lamp for someone it will also brighten your own path.” ~Buddhist Proverb
Being Bad With Names
I’m bad with names. Sometimes, when somebody tells me his name, I catch myself having forgotten about it literally in the next sentence. I’ve tried some tech...
Impressive Drawing Skills
As long as I can think, I’ve been drawing. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what else I’ve been up to. My Bachelor’s, Master’s, and even the begi...
Continuous Blogging
This is it. This is me reaching the end of John Sonmez’s “How to Create a Blog that Boosts Your Career” course. This is me kicking off a new blog. Not my fi...
MSR17
To Mock or Not To Mock?
Whenever we write a new piece of software, we have to decide whether we want to test it in its reals context and/or in isolation. The latter case is commonly...
The Unix History Repository: Its creation, contents, and use.
MSR’s keynote is given by Diomidis Spinellis about the Unix History Repository. Unix is very large system originating from the Bell Laboratories. Many ideas ...
An Empirical Analysis on the Docker Container Ecosystem on Github
Docker containers power the infrastructure of modern deployments. Docker quickly became a de-facto standard in industry and made lightweight virtualization a...
Travis Torrent Mining Challenge
Travis is a free-of-charge continuous integration service tightly integrated with GitHub. Travis Torrent is a dataset containing build data about 1.200 Java ...
Research Infrastructure for MSR: Needs, Wants, and Where We Are
Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is an important research direction in the software engineering area. Today, researchers are exploring not only traditional...
Predicting Likelihood of Requirement Implementation within the Planned Iteration
The work was motivated by IBM’s desire to predict whether a feature would make it in the planned iteration. The work builds on previous work that predicts co...
Extracting Code Segments and Their Descriptions from Research Articles
Code examples from various source, such as StackOverflow or documentation, have been explored to support goals such as code recommendation, comment generatio...
Maven
Just Use My Testing Infrastructure
I use the Maven dependency ecosystem to provide code dependencies to my students via a Maven repository hosted on my group’s artifact page. This gives studen...
Meta
Back to Schedule
As you might have noticed, if you’ve been following this blog through the first half of 2017, I stopped writing somewhen in the beginning of June. This had t...
About Assumptions
Some weeks ago, I attended a talk about IntelliJ IDEA. It was an interactive talk, to the most part, where attendees would ask questions about the IDE and th...
Unsustainable Pace
Early in my PhD, attending my first conference, in fact, I stated that I usually don’t work on weekends and public holidays. Several jaws dropped. “How do yo...
eXtreme Researching (XR)
I’m an academic. I’ve never had a full-time developer job in my life. Yet, I write and screencast about software development. Why the heck should you care to...
Continuous Blogging
This is it. This is me reaching the end of John Sonmez’s “How to Create a Blog that Boosts Your Career” course. This is me kicking off a new blog. Not my fi...
Misc
Photoshop Requires Legacy Java 6 (OSX)
It is a sad fact that my old version of Photoshop (CS4) requires a Java 6 installation to start. This is especially cumbersome, because OSX keeps removing Ja...
Project Management
Inadvertent Prudent Technical Debt
I recently stumbled upon a great talk by Martin Flower about Technical Debt.1 In the talk, he first classifies technical debt according to whether you are aw...
To Agile or To(o) Lean
Research is agile. Not only in its software development, but in its entirety. Simply because one rarely knows where it’s going next. Research is, by its very...
Unsustainable Pace
Early in my PhD, attending my first conference, in fact, I stated that I usually don’t work on weekends and public holidays. Several jaws dropped. “How do yo...
Let Students Engineer!
There’s always too much work left to do at the end of the day. If you do the research, you don’t get around to do the programming. If you do the programming,...
Academics Code Only Prototypes
“Academic code is like startup code, only we don’t claim its production ready.” ~A speaker at the 33C3
Quality
Naming Tests
Recently, I received an email from a former student assistant of mine, who observed that I name tests different today, compared to when we were working toget...
Legacy Code Retreat
Where does legacy code come from? What is legacy code, anyway? Why should we care about it? Can we make it go away? How? Can we prevent it from coming back, ...
Reuse
Did you ever find yourself facing a problem, wishing you had a program to solve it for you? I certainly did. Repeatedly.
Inadvertent Prudent Technical Debt
I recently stumbled upon a great talk by Martin Flower about Technical Debt.1 In the talk, he first classifies technical debt according to whether you are aw...
Being Bad With Names
I’m bad with names. Sometimes, when somebody tells me his name, I catch myself having forgotten about it literally in the next sentence. I’ve tried some tech...
To Agile or To(o) Lean
Research is agile. Not only in its software development, but in its entirety. Simply because one rarely knows where it’s going next. Research is, by its very...
Academics Code Only Prototypes
“Academic code is like startup code, only we don’t claim its production ready.” ~A speaker at the 33C3
Adam and the Tests
A strong set of tests gives me confidence that the tools I devise do what I want them to do and that my experiments test what I intend them to test. This is ...
How I Came to Test
As you might remember, academics code, too. And that’s not even only computer scientists: The first of my friends who needed to program in university were ph...
TDD is for Dreamers, not for Real-World Developers, Isn’t It?
Yesterday, I gave a talk about TDD and the TDD-Discussions on Entwicklertag Frankfurt. TDD has caused many discussions, both heated and thoughtful, over the ...
Is TDD Just Unit-Test Waste?
In early 2014, Cope published an article titled “Why Most Unit Testing Is Waste” and little later a follow up. In these articles, Cope states that unit testi...
TDD vs. Architecture
In 2007, Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) and James O. Coplien (Cope) had a discussion about TDD at the JAOO Conference. Uncle Bob opened the discussion proclaim...
Reproducibility
Docker for Cross-platform Research Prototypes
Something I like about my job in academia, is the freedom with respect to what I work with. When I first started, I chose and configured my own laptop. When ...
TDD
The Dawn of TDD
Young and unexperienced our art is and unique properties it has.
Talks
TDD is for Dreamers, not for Real-World Developers, Isn’t It?
Yesterday, I gave a talk about TDD and the TDD-Discussions on Entwicklertag Frankfurt. TDD has caused many discussions, both heated and thoughtful, over the ...
Teaching
Legacy Code Retreat
Where does legacy code come from? What is legacy code, anyway? Why should we care about it? Can we make it go away? How? Can we prevent it from coming back, ...
I Teach, So I Learn
“If you light a lamp for someone it will also brighten your own path.” ~Buddhist Proverb
Testing
Just Use My Testing Infrastructure
I use the Maven dependency ecosystem to provide code dependencies to my students via a Maven repository hosted on my group’s artifact page. This gives studen...
Naming Tests
Recently, I received an email from a former student assistant of mine, who observed that I name tests different today, compared to when we were working toget...
Adam and the Tests
A strong set of tests gives me confidence that the tools I devise do what I want them to do and that my experiments test what I intend them to test. This is ...
How I Came to Test
As you might remember, academics code, too. And that’s not even only computer scientists: The first of my friends who needed to program in university were ph...
TDD is for Dreamers, not for Real-World Developers, Isn’t It?
Yesterday, I gave a talk about TDD and the TDD-Discussions on Entwicklertag Frankfurt. TDD has caused many discussions, both heated and thoughtful, over the ...
Is TDD Just Unit-Test Waste?
In early 2014, Cope published an article titled “Why Most Unit Testing Is Waste” and little later a follow up. In these articles, Cope states that unit testi...
TDD vs. Architecture
In 2007, Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) and James O. Coplien (Cope) had a discussion about TDD at the JAOO Conference. Uncle Bob opened the discussion proclaim...
The Dawn of TDD
Young and unexperienced our art is and unique properties it has.
Time Management
Too Many Things
Back when I was a PhD student, I always had too many™️ projects going on in parallel. There usually were one or two things in my own paper pipeline, a handfu...
WAPI17
Opportunities in Software Engineering Research for Web API Consumption
Web APIs are a sibling of traditional APIs, but their exact relation remains unclear. Erik Wittern gives an introduction into the problems of current Web API...
Type Checking for Reliable APIs
Maria Kechagia presented her work on improving the usability of APIs via type checking. Her idea is that compiler should take into account statically availab...
WAPI Open Discussion
We concluded the workshop with on open discussion about the different challenges we see and possible next steps for researchers to work on. I tried to captur...
Mining Motivated Trends of Usage of Haskell Libraries
Anand Ashok Sawant presents a preliminary study about why developers migrate between API versions.
Human-Centered Methods for Improving API Usability
Brad Myers gives a wonderful keynote to open the 1st Internation Workshop on API Usage and Evolution (WAPI). He discusses problem space of API design and usa...
API Usage in Descriptions of Source Code Functionality
Paige Rodeghero presents a preliminary experiment and how automatically generated method summaries mention API elements.
On the Role of Fitness Dimensions in API Design Assessment - An Empirical Investigation
Imed Hammouda presents suggests an approach to assess API Design along 23 Fitness Dimensions.
API Evolution and Migration at Google
Hyrum Wright reports on how Google evolves its APIs and manages the migration of its entire codebase to new API versions. He discusses various tradeoffs and ...