NIER session

The rapid growth of social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn underscores the need for people to connect to existing and new contacts for recreational and professional purposes. A parallel of this phenomenon exists in the software development arena as well. Open-source code sharing platforms such as GitHub provide the ability to follow people and projects of interest. However, users are manually required to identify projects or other users whom they might be interested in following. We observe that most software projects use third-party libraries and that developers who contribute to multiple projects often use the same library APIs across projects. Thus, the library APIs seem to be a good fingerprint of their skill set. Hence, we argue that library APIs can form the social glue to connect people and projects having similar interests. We propose APINet, a system that mines API usage profiles from source code version management systems and create a social network of people, projects and libraries. We describe our initial implementation that uses data from 568 open-source projects hosted on GitHub. Our system recommends to a user new projects and people that they may be interested in, suggests communities of people who use related libraries and finds experts for a given topic who are closest in a user's social graph.

Software engineering for ‘social good’ is an area receiving growing interest in recent years. Software is increasingly seen as a way to promote positive social change: this includes initiatives such as Code for America and events such as hackathons, which strive to build innovative software solutions with a social conscience. From a software engineering perspective, existing software processes do not always match the needs of these social software projects, which are primarily aimed at social change and often involve vulnerable communities. In this paper, we argue for new software processes that combine elements of agile, iterative development with principles drawn from action research and participatory design. The former allow social software projects to be built quickly with limited resources; the latter allow for a proper understanding of the social context and vulnerable user groups. The paper describes Speedplay, a software development management framework integrating these approaches, and illustrates its use in a real social innovation case study.

One of the pillars of the modern scientific method is model validation: comparing a scientific model's predictions against empirical observations. Today, a scientist demonstrates the validity of a model by making an argument in a paper and submitting it for peer review, a process comparable to code review in software engineering. While human review helps to ensure that contributions meet high-level goals, software engineers typically supplement it with unit testing to get a more complete picture of the status of a project. We argue that a similar test-driven methodology would be valuable to scientific communities as they seek to validate increasingly complex models against growing repositories of empirical data. Scientific communities differ from software communities in several key ways, however. In this paper, we introduce SciUnit, a framework for test-driven scientific model validation, and outline how, supported by new and existing collaborative infrastructure, it could integrate into the modern scientific process.

This paper proposes a research methodology, Lab-based Action Design Research, which combines organizational intervention (action research), building innovative artifacts (engineering research) and studies of software development practice (behavioral research) within a laboratory environment. Seven principles for successful Lab-based Action Design Research are proposed – attract funding with a win-win scenario; select inspiring projects; conduct simultaneous studies; mix methods; use longitudinal, quasi-experimental designs; use enterprise-level technical infrastructure; use established project management infrastructure. Initial evaluation indicates that the proposed approach is practical and may produce improvements in internal validity and theoretical generalizability.

Cloning is widely used for creating new product variants. While it has low adoption costs, it often leads to maintenance problems. Long term reliance on cloning is discouraged in favor of systematic reuse offered by product line engineering (PLE) with a central platform integrating all reusable assets. Unfortunately, adopting an integrated platform requires a risky and costly migration. However, industrial experience shows that some benefits of an integrated platform can be achieved by properly managing a set of cloned variants. In this paper, we propose an incremental and minimally invasive PLE adoption strategy called virtual platform. Virtual platform covers a spectrum of strategies between ad-hoc clone and own and PLE with a fully-integrated platform divided into six governance levels. Transitioning to a governance level requires some effort and it provides some incremental benefits. We discuss tradeoffs among the levels and illustrate the strategy on an example implementation.

Error notifications and their resolutions, as presented by modern IDEs, are still cryptic and confusing to developers. We propose an interaction-first approach to help developers more effectively comprehend and resolve compiler error notifications through a conceptual interaction framework. We propose novel taxonomies that can serve as controlled vocabularies for compiler notifications and their resolutions. We use preliminary taxonomies to demonstrate, through a prototype IDE, how the taxonomies make notifications and their resolutions more consistent and unified.