Smokey Pete’s Tavern bans guns in these premises

Seen in Minneapolis:

The fact that they needed to make it explicit somehow fails to reassure me.

ICSE 2007, Day 3 (and last)

Some pointers to interesting research presented on the third –and last– day of the International Conference on Software Engineering:

• Information needs of software teams: Andrew Ko reported on a nice paper about the kinds of information needed by developers in a Microsoft team. The list of “information needs” that the study offers can easily be treated as a very comprehensive set of urgent human aspects research in software development. (You can access the paper, and the list, in Andrew’s website).
• Pair programming: Jan Chong presented a very insightful ethnographic study of pair programming. One of the most striking take-away messages were that having two keyboards makes a huge difference in the dynamic of the pair. (The paper, as well, is available in Jan’s website).
• Roles in open source: Chris Jensen discussed the ‘advancement’ of roles of open source developers, from his trawling the archives of three major OSS projects. (Yup, the paper is in his website too.)
• Requirements engineering research directions: Betty Cheng presented a list of challenges for future requirements engineering research. Issues of scale, self-managing systems, and tolerance of software of non-provable reliability were thrown in the mix.
• Programming environments: Andreas Zeller set a vision of programming environments that join several tools that developers depend on –bug databases, version control, e-mail, chat, requirements descriptions, etc.– and mines their data to find useful, non-intrusive information.
• Search-based software engineering: In what for me was one of the few “so wacky it could work” talks in this conference, Mark Harman convincingly argued that search-based approaches –such as genetic algorithms– for find good solutions to software engineering problems is a viable strategy (“not a silver bullet, but at least a machine gun with lots of nickel bullets”) .
•  Empirical software engineering: Lionel Briand presented a paper by Dag Sjoberg & Co. on the future of empirical methods in software engineering. The need for third-party evaluation of proposals was made evident: when evaluation studies are conducted by the proponents of the technology, the results are almost always positive. When they are conducted by a different party, they are almost always negative. Although Briand did a great job presenting the paper, I was disappointed that I was not able to meet its authors, whose researched I’ve blogged about before. Apparently, the presenter was denied entry to the US for some minor problem with his passport. Way to go. Fortunately, the next two ICSEs will take place out of the US (Germany in 2008, and Canada in 2009), and away from overzealous immigration officers.

That was it for the conference. It was an extremely productive week, but I’m tired, homesick and glad to be heading back home!

ICSE 2007, Day 2

Second day at ICSE, and again a nice batch of paper presentations:

• Testing: John Rooksby & Co. presented an ethnographic study of testing in a small company. They pointed out how “rigour” in testing is constrained by dynamics of customer relationships, strategic decisions, and testing effort.
• Software Coordination: Jim Herbsleb listed the challenges and research areas for upcoming studies in global software engineering. Among the items in his list were assessing the impacts of requirements changes (who is affected, how should they be notified?), development environment issues (utility of being aware of others’ actions vs. each developer’s privacy), and defining an architecture/organization “fit”: “Can this organization (with its particular combination of geographic distribution, skills, and structure) produce software that conforms to this architecture?”.
• Code Mobility: As part of a retrospective on the winner of the Most Influential Paper Award from ICSE 1997, Antonio Carzaniga, Gian Pietro Picco, and Giovanni Vigna talked about the various ways of thinking about “mobile code” –code that is sent to be executed to a different party over a network–, and about the impact that these various alternatives (mobile agents, remote evaluation, and others) have had over the years.

There was also a very nice banquet where we were able to try (a) archery, (b) tomahawk axe throwing, (c) segway riding (it doesn’t feel as dorky as it looks), and (d) s’mores by the fire. Good stuff!

ICSE 2007, Day 1

Some notes of Day 1* of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, from Minneapolis:

To me, the high point of the day, and quite possibly of the conference, was a panel session on “Retrospectives on Peopleware”, with Barry Boehm, Fred Brooks Jr., Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, Linda Rising, and Ed Yourdon. I don’t know how much these names mean to you, but their work is practically the reason why I came back to grad school. Two of the few books I brought with me when I left Mexico were DeMarco and Lister’s Peopleware and Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month. Back then I thought that’s what software engineering should be all about, and I was very disappointed when I found so many people ignoring the essence of the problem of software development (the sociology and psychology of programming) to focus on far more comfortable problems that can be “proved” with math or logic, but that have little connection to real software work.
Incidentally, the panel touched on that topic (Fred Brooks ascribes the lack of Peopleware-related papers in ICSE simply to tenure, and DeMarco said he always had difficulty getting papers in ICSE because they were “squishy”. When his papers got in, he said, it was as “experience reports”. He invites everyone with “experience report” papers to call all other papers “non-experience reports”). They also discussed why it took so long for something like the Agile movement to come up (DeMarco: “I blame Barry [Boehm]“), the need for “hard play” –creative, deeply satisfying activities– in software development, and how terms from the Peopleware book can now be used to refer to complex concepts in everyday geek language: team jellying and furniture police, among others.

It was a very entertaining session –one could easily listen to these people all day. By the way, you can find Linda Rising (“the token female on the panel”) on InfoQ discussing, of all things, primate sex and how it relates to agile development.

Other notes on papers presented today:

• Andrea Capiluppi & Co. presented what they claim is the first evolutionary study of agile development. They investigated the code-base of a project developed using all of XP’s practices. They found that “code complexity is low, and that the relative amount of complexity control work (e.g. refactoring) is higher than in other systems we have studied”. Most of the code in the repository (70%) was test code, and 46% of the “touches” to files were devoted to decrease complexity.
• Jeffrey Stylos and Steven Clarke reported on a study to assess the usability of two types of constructor calls (parameterized vs. parameter-less, default constructors) in APIs. “Contrary to expectations, programmers strongly preferred and were more effective with APIs that did not require constructor parameters”. They speculate that this is because parameterized constructors force developers to commit prematurely to decisions they have not worked out yet.
• Jayakanth Srinivasan and Kristina Lundqvist described an educational simulation game they use to teach software process models to their students. The game follows a constructivist approach, in that it enables students to discover the strengths and weaknesses of software process models for themselves.
• Jeffrey Carver & Co. had a paper on the software development environments used by five scientific and engineering groups. Among several interesting insights, they found that these groups distrust higher-level languages, IDEs, and almost all external software, and that they value the portability and stability of older platforms and languages.
• Ekwa Duala-Ekoko and Martin Robillard presented an approach to manage code clones instead of trying to eliminate them through refactoring. They describe “clone regions” in a manner that is independent from the exact text of the clones, and are able to track changes and simultaneously edit all clones in the “region”. Their paper won a Distinguished Paper award.
• Another well-deserved Distinguished Paper award went to my colleagues and professors, Shiva Nejati, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Marsha Chechik, Steve Easterbrook, and Pamela Zave, for their work on matching and merging statecharts specifications. Congratulations!

* Although this is Day 1 of the conference, its collocated events started 4 days ago. I came here to present a paper I co-authored with Neil Ernst, Jennifer Horkoff, and Steve Easterbrook, on evaluating the comprehensibility of modeling languages, as part of the Models in Software Engineering workshop. If you’re interested, you can take a look at the paper and the presentation slides.

Monbiot on Global Warming

I have just finished reading George Monbiot’s “Heat”, and I have to recommend it fully. It is a thoroughly researched, brilliant book on global warming and the actions we must take to mitigate its consequences. Monbiot starts by voicing the same frustration I’ve often experienced:

What is the point of cycling into town when the rest of the world is thundering past in monster trucks? By refusing to own a car, I have simply given up my road space to someone who drives a hungrier model than I would have bought. Why pay for double-glazing windows when the supermarkets are heating the pavement with the hot air blowers above their doors? Why bother installing an energy-efficient lightbulb when a man in Lanarkshire boasts of attaching 1.2 million Christmas lights to his house?

He does something far more beneficial than just installing an energy-efficient lightbulb: he presents the global warming problem in plain terms, proceeds to calculate what needs to be done to tackle the problem (a seemingly impossible 90% carbon emissions cut), and finalizes making the argument that such a solution is not only necessary, but feasible. His scheme –a sort of carbon rationing– does not rely on technological miracles, but it does require a critical mass of global citizens that demand their governments to take this problem seriously (and he does mean seriously, as in “this is the biggest problem facing humankind today” seriously). Monbiot believes, and I agree with him, that our governments have caught on to the idea that we want them to look serious on climate change, but that we don’t want them to demand real sacrifices from us:

They know that inside their electors there is a small but insistent voice asking them both to try and to fail. They know that if they had the misfortune to succeed, our lives would have to change. They know that we can contemplate a transformation of anyone’s existence but our own.

So they play to the script which we have all ghost-written. They will make frowning speeches about the threat to the planet and the need for action. They will announce that this issue is of such importance that it transcends the usual political differences and requires a cross-party consensus. They will urge everyone to pull together and confront the enormity of the threat. Then they will discover, to their great disappointment, that progress has not been made, that it is in fact very difficult to make, and the decision about what should be done will yet again have to be deferred.

Heat has three virtues I particularly liked. First, it is clear: Monbiot’s writing is crisp, and solidly backed-up by science. Second, it is brave: it has no patience for environmentalist wishful thinking, and demonstrates the severe weaknesses of solar, wind, and other clean energy, while discussing nuclear power with a cool mind. And third, it is bold: as opposed to Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Monbiot shows that what is required from us is an effort greater than just praying and riding a bike –we may not like it, but, as he points out, anybody is welcome to formulate less painful solutions him/herself.

Cinco de Mayo?

Completely off-topic, but I had to throw this little rant somewhere:

When I first came to Canada I expected to find lots of people with the ranchero-in-the-desert stereotypes of my home country (not that Mexicans are any better when it comes to Canadian stereotypes, by the way). What I didn’t expect was to have May 5th associated with Mexican festivities, here and in the U.S.

So, a clarification for my non-Mexican friends:

Yes, Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican holiday, but a minor one. Our equivalent to the U.S. 4th of July, or to Canada’s Canada Day, is our Independence Day –September 16th.

May 5th is the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla, when the Mexicans unexpectedly held off invading French forces. Mexico won the battle, but lost the war, and the occupying French forces installed a (short-lived) Empire.

It’s really bizarre to see the “wrong” holiday being celebrated out of Mexico. My theory is that it was promoted in the U.S. because it’s not about Mexican independence, but about beating the French –and we all know about that weird American obsession with bringing France down.

xkcd’s map of online communities

This map from webcomic xkcd is absolutely cool:

Among my favourite bits: The sunken island of Usenet, the small “Attractive MySpace Pages” peninsula in proportion to the huge MySpace kingdom, and how the Bay of Angst shores on Xanga and LiveJournal.

(Speaking of weird maps, you should really check out the Strange Maps blog if you haven’t yet!)