Dr. Alexander Serebrenik, professor at Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands, answers questions on his recent keynote at CBSoft 2020 which summarizes his years of research on understanding and addressing diversity and inclusion challenges in software engineering.  He also shares with us some of the challenges in studying human aspects since given our training to study technical aspects, and questions are "bots also people"?  The Q&A also leads to discussion about coding courses and hubs for women only, and affirmative hiring actions. Finally, Alexander discusses with us how we may leverage social media and inclusive tools to address diversity challenges.   

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Diversity,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 30th, 2020.   In preparation for today's workshop,  we read or watched materials posted on this page.

This Q&A is also available on YouTube.

Brian Houck, principal program manager at Microsoft, describes the Code Review experience in Azure, sharing with us how static analysis tools are used to shift problems left, how code review is pivotal in avoiding security vulnerabilities, how code review supports building community and the role it plays it onboarding developer to new teams. Brian talks about the unique challenges faced in Azure and Windows: issues of scale and churn across multiple platforms and languages, the need to support code review across team boundaries, and challenges finding experts in such a complex and large scale system.  He also talks about the future design of code review tools that must address these challenges and integrate with unique developer tools. In the following Q&A, Brian discusses dealing with biases in software practices, as well as why mixed research methods are needed to understand and support the challenges they face in his team.

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Code Review and Assessment,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 25th, 2020.

In preparation for today's workshop,  we read/watched materials posted on this page. 

This Q&A is also available on YouTube.

Dr. Christian (Chris) Bird, software researcher at Microsoft Research, discusses his paper and recent insights about code review at Microsoft. Chris shares with us how this study was one of the first to use developer interviews to understand the motivations and benefits of doing code review that go beyond code quality.  He also discusses the success of CodeFlow, a grassroots code review tool that saw widespread adoption across Microsoft and is widely used today.  He further muses how code reviews could be even more efficient and productive, and describes novel ideas around guided code reviews that could help developers do code reviews while working from home, and also how questions asked during code reviews could be leveraged to help generate documentation.  

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Code Review and Assessment,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 25th, 2020. 

In preparation for today's workshop,  we read/watched materials posted on this page. 

This Q&A is also available as a YouTube video.

Dr. Jorge Aranda, software practitioner at Workday, discusses the "Secret Life of Bugs" paper from 2009.  Jorge shares with us how this landmark study informed our community about the limitations of data mining studies and he suggests future research to investigate how the coordination patterns he identified in his study may or may not hold today given modern communication channels and cloud based project deployment.   

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Code Review and Assessment,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 25th, 2020.

In preparation for today's workshop,  we read/watched materials posted on this page.

This podcast is also available as a video on YouTube.

Dr. Ali Mesbah, professor at UBC, visits our class and answers questions about his paper  (linked below) on how  test assertions are more effective than code and branch coverage for improving test suite effectiveness. Ali also mentions how machine machine generated assertions fare against human written assertions, how mutation testing is making its way into industry use, how being conservative in our claims about SE research may undersell the value of our research.  Our discussion also leads to some exciting ideas for future research in this area!  

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Continuous Software Engineering,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 25th, 2020.

 In preparation for today's workshop on continuous software engineering we read/watched materials posted on this page.

In particular, we read this paper before the Q&A:  "Assertions Are Strongly Correlated with Test Suite Effectiveness" by Yucheng Zhang and Ali Mesbah, ESEC/FSE 2015.

This Q&A is also available as a video on YouTube. 

Dr. Nicole Forsgren, VP of Research and Strategy at GitHub and author of "Accelerate:  a book on the Science of Lean Software and DevOps"  shares her journey from NLP and ethnographies of sys admins to DevOps and her studies of Team Performance. 

In the Q&A, she discusses how tradeoffs between speed and stability are not made by either high or low performing teams, but high performing teams do well with both. She also discusses impact of culture on DevOps, how high performing teams may not be as susceptible to burnout and how to think about individual developer productivity.   

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Continuous Software Engineering,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 16th, 2020.  In preparation for today's workshop on continuous software engineering we read/watched materials posted  on this page: https://github.com/margaretstorey/EmseUvic2020/blob/master/resources/contSE.md

This Q&A is also available on YouTube

At a workshop on Continuous Software Engineering, Dr. Eben Haber from Couchbase and author of  the book "Taming Information Technology", discussed his work and answered our class questions about his ethnographic studies of work practices within complex socio-technical systems, in particular the studies of system administrators.  

To quote Eben, "if you have the chance to do ethnographic studies of work practices, do it!" In addition to answering questions about his work, he shares some tips on doing ethnography.   This Q&A was recorded live at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 16th, 2020.  In preparation for today's workshop on continuous software engineering we read/watched materials posted  on this page.  

This talk is also available on YouTube

Here is a link to Eben's book: 

At a workshop on Continuous Software Engineering (part of a Course on Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria), Dr. Chandra Maddila from Microsoft Research discusses AIOps with our class.  

Chandra answers questions about how AI and machine learning can improve developer productivity, and how techniques used in the Sankie platform could apply to other companies.    

This talk and Q&A (starting at approx. min 48) was recorded live at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 16th, 2020.

This talk is also available  on Youtube:  https://youtu.be/UHMLMi_Ks8o

In preparation for today's workshop on continuous software engineering we read/watched materials posted  on this page: https://github.com/margaretstorey/EmseUvic2020/blob/master/resources/contSE.md

In this week's recorded live lecture at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria, Dr. Elise Paradis demystifies the differences between objectivist deductive research and subjective inductive research, shares how theories help bridge the tension between engineering and science, and with the course participants discusses why we should do research that is both personally and internally coherent.   

This talk and Q&A (starting at approx. min 48) was recorded live at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 2nd, 2020 (https://github.com/margaretstorey/Ems...).   

Elise Paradis, PhD, is an award-winning researcher, mentor and speaker with an expertise in teamwork. She uses a range of methods in her research, from content analysis to ethnography, interviews, bibliometrics and scoping reviews. Dr. Paradis obtained her PhD from Stanford in 2011. She joined the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto in 2015, and also holds appointments in medicine, sociology, and at the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research. She held the Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Healthcare Practice until 2019, when she left the University of Toronto to work at Facebook. Her emphasis is now on maximizing engineers’ wellbeing and productivity through research. She is currently at UVic/Chisel conducting a critical review of the literature on software engineering.  

The presentation and discussion focused on these papers:  

This is also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_8aPAGD6tdA 

Conducted live during a Senior Topics Course on Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria, Sept 25th, 2020.  

Dr. Rashina Hoda presents a concise and clear overview of grounded theory in this recorded talk.  Her talk (after 36 or so minutes)  is followed by an interview (Q&A)  where Rashina answers, in a very thoughtful and clear way, practical questions about how she came to use grounded theory in her research, how to do grounded theory in a rigorous manner (and publish along the way), how to mitigate research biases, which coding tools she uses and why, and she shares advice with us on how to do grounded theory during this time of work/learn from home.  

Rashina's talk and our discussion was based on this paper:  Developing a grounded theory to explain the practices of self-organizing Agile teams. Hoda, R., Noble, J. & Marshall, S., Empirical Software Eng 17, 609–639 (2012). (https://link.springer.com/article/10....)

This is also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/z-Yr27qtePM