MSR Day 2; ICPC Day 1
Tom Ball gave an inspiring history of version control tool evolution and its relation to the present field of mining software repositories. What surprised me is that in the mid 80’s, there existed tools for editing code across versions similar to how Apple’s Time Machine provides access to historical versions of files; of course, minus the fancy 3D animations.
I met Susan Sim and her student Sukanya Ratanotayanon–both from UC Irvine–at the ICPC poster session. Susan was presenting an interesting visualization of concept location activities as a graph similar to an EKG. It reminded me of body position graphs used by polysomnographists which indicate whether a person is sleeping on their side, back or stomach. Frequent changes in the graph indicate whether they’re uncomfortable while they sleep; however the graph alone is not enough of an indicator of whether they’re breathing is obstructed–which is the primary reason for conducting a polysomnographic study.
Sukanya presented a semi-automatic method for concern map recovery. I’m curious how the contents of the concern maps she generates compare to the task contexts built by tools like Mylyn when used by experienced developers. If her method can reliably predict which files a developer would probably need to review or modify for a given task, that would certainly help users of Mylyn prepopulate a task context to guide their navigation around a code base.
I also met Jim Buckley from the University of Limerick. He’s studying the information seeking behaviours of open source developers. His study found that for certain open source projects, the most prevalent questions asked on developer mailing were about development processes (e.g. How do I access the bug tracker?). He also found more than half the questions asked went unanswered. I’m wondering whether those questions weren’t answered because the answer existed elsewhere on the project portal such as a wiki page.
Rain is in the forecast for the next two days. I spent much of the afternoon outdoors wandering along the sea wall, through Stanley Park, and around downtown Vancouver. I finished off the evening with some uni and mint-infused shochu. It was quite smooth and didn’t taste like it was 25% alcohol by volume–although I certainly felt the 25% a short time later.