MSR 2022 features the new “Vision and Reflection” track, which seeks to invite MSR experts to give mini-keynotes reflecting on how the MSR community has gotten to its current state and on providing a vision about the future of MSR. More concretely, this year’s edition of the track consists of 2 sessions, i.e., one reflecting on the past and one focusing on the future. The session about the “past” involves looking back at popular ideas and common expectations about MSR research from the early beginning of the field, to see the extent to which those expectations have been met or have evolved. The session about the “future” explores emerging topics and themes in MSR research and the extent to which the field is able to address those.
For the past session, we will hold the following mini keynotes:
Title: Back to the future: Empirical Revolution(s) in Software Engineering
Audris Mockus
University of Tennessee
Abstract: The desire to better understand software development lead to numerous attempts to quantify it. Easy-to-measure artifacts, such as source code, could provide only the most basic understanding of the entire development process and the attempts to directly measure quality and effort were cost-prohibitive, error-prone, and rarely shared with researchers or made public. The rise of open source not only provided a reliable software infrastructure but also the rich data source for the software engineering community to finally measure aspects of software development never seen before. Over time and with increased use of open source software, actual developers increasingly need to deal not just with their own project but with projects upstream, downstream, or sideways in the huge open source software supply chain. Measures derived from the entire software supply chain are now likely to bring about the next software engineering revolution.
Bio: Audris Mockus received BS and MS degrees in applied mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1988, the MS degree in 1991 and a PhD degree in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1994. He studies software developers’ culture and behavior through the recovery, documentation, and analysis of digital remains. These digital traces reflect projections of collective and individual activity. He reconstructs the reality from these projections by designing data mining methods to summarize and augment these digital traces, interactive visualization techniques to inspect, present, and control the behavior of teams and individuals, and statistical models and optimization techniques to understand the nature of individual and collective behavior. Mockus is the Ericsson-Harlan Mills Chair Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UT. He also continues to work part-time at Avaya Labs Research. Previously he worked in the Software Production Research Department at Bell Labs. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.
Title: Engineering the MSR Field and the Joy of Research
Ahmed E. Hassan
Queen’s University
Abstract: The joy of exploring the unknowns and trailblazing new directions is what drives many researchers. However such activities come with great risks. It is of great importance for us to encourage such activities for the community as a whole to grow and thrive.
For the past 20 years, the MSR community has led many innovations (e.g., the data track, the challenge track, registered reports, and the MSR awards) with an eye on encouraging risks and bringing joy to MSR researchers. Over the years, the SE community has adopted many MSR innovations that have had an enormous impact on the rigour and sophistication of SE research.
In this brief talk, I will explain the motivation behind many of these MSR innovations while discussing challenges in the road ahead, as the rigour and sophistication expectations of published research threaten the freedoms and joys of researchers, in turn slowing the overall progress of our field.
Bio: Ahmed E. Hassan is the NSERC/RIM Industrial Research Chair in Software Engineering for Ultra Large Scale systems and the Canada Research Chair in Software Analytics at the School of Computing in Queen’s University. Dr. Hassan spearheaded the organization and creation of the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference and its research community. He co-edited special issues of the IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering and the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering on the MSR topic. Early tools and techniques developed by Dr. Hassan’s team are already integrated into products used by millions of users worldwide. Dr. Hassan industrial experience includes helping architect the Blackberry wireless platform at RIM, and working for IBM Research at the Almaden Research Lab and the Computer Research Lab at Nortel Networks. Dr. Hassan is the named inventor of patents at several jurisdictions around the world including the United States, Europe, India, Canada, and Japan. Dr. Hassan received the Ph.D., MMath, and BMath degrees from the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Title: It’s all in your network: How mining developer collaboration allowed us to peer into complex socio-technical aspects of software development
Daniela Damian
University of Victoria
Abstract: The way in which developers collaborate and use collaborative tools has changed significantly in the last two decades. So did the way in which software is being developed. A number of techniques have been developed to mine developer collaboration from project repositories, from mailing lists in the early open source projects, to the integrated development environments that followed, to GitHub that has offered the case of open, large scale collaborations with unprecedented modes of implicit coordination. This talk will review some of these techniques, as well as the rich and fruitful empirical research they facilitated into the socio-technical aspects of software development. This includes properties and patterns of developer collaboration and knowledge flow in open source and proprietary software projects. The software engineering community now has a much better understanding of the social structures in software projects, intricacies of socio-technical congruence in co-located and distributed software development, as well as their complicated relationships to software quality and performance.
Bio: Daniela Damian is a Professor of Software Engineering in University of Victoria’s Department of Computer Science, where she leads research in the Software Engineering Global interAction Laboratory (SEGAL, thesegalgroup.org). Her work has studied socio-technical coordination in large, distributed projects, requirements engineering, global software development, software engineering education, and platform-based software ecosystems. Her recent interests include diversity and inclusion in software development. Daniela has served on the program committee boards or Program Co-Chair of several software engineering conferences, as well as on the editorial boards of Transactions on Software Engineering and the Journal of Requirements Engineering. She is serving on the Advisory Board at the Empirical Software Engineering Journal and as the Human Aspects Area Editor for the Journal of Software and Systems. She is ICSE 2022 Program co-Chair, together with Andreas Zeller. Contact her at danielad@uvic.ca, danieladamian.ca, @DanaHDamian
For the future session, we will hold the following mini keynotes:
Title: Bias in MSR research
Alexander Serebrenik
TU Eindhoven
Abstract: Rather than talking about the topics we study as is customary in scientific presentations, in this talk I would like to reflect on what we as the MSR research community usually do not study, what kind of voices we rarely hear, what kind of projects we rarely see, how these voices and projects influence results of our studies and how can we try and improve this situation.
Bio: Alexander Serebrenik (PhD, KU Leuven, 2003) is a Full Professor of Social Software Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. He has co-authored a book Evolving Software Systems (Springer Verlag, 2014) and circa 200 scientific papers and articles. He has won several distinguished paper and distinguished review awards, as well as acted as steering committee chair, general chair, program (co-)chair and track (co-)chair of such software engineering conferences as ICSE, ICSME, ICPC and SANER.
Title: The Next Generation of Software Developers
Denae Ford Robinson
Microsoft Research
Abstract: Microsoft is home to the world’s largest developer communities and ecosystems with Azure, GitHub, and Visual Studio. Thus, having sustainable and inclusive communities is of strategic importance as it has the potential to transform society by enabling more people to develop software. Developers in these communities and others (e.g., Stack Overflow, YouTube, Twitter) often intersect aspects of their professional work with their personal life on social media platforms which allow them to feel more comfortable engaging. Therefore, understanding how developers operate at these intersections helps practitioners to better prepare for the evolution of online professional communities and continue to bridge its enterprise and consumer markets. In this talk, I will cover recent research on evolving developer communities and outline opportunities on how we can usher in the next generation of software developers by fostering healthy and inclusive communities.
Bio: Dr. Denae Ford Robinson is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in the SAINTes group and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Her research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. In her work she identifies and dismantles cognitive and social barriers by designing mechanisms to support software developer participation in online socio-technical ecosystems. She is best known for her research on just-in-time mentorship as a mode to empower welcoming engagement in collaborative Q&A for online programming communities including open-source software and work to empower marginalized software developers in online communities. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. She also received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Graduate Minor in Cognitive Science from North Carolina State University. She is also a recipient of the National GEM Consortium Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship. Her research publications can be found under her pen name ‘Denae Ford’. More information about her latest research can be found on her website: http://denaeford.me/
Title: Mining Software Repositories in the age of AI
Foutse Khomh
Polytechnique Montreal
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly deployed in large-scale and critical systems thanks to recent breakthroughs in deep learning and reinforcement learning. Traditionally, software systems are constructed deductively, by writing down the rules that govern the behavior of the system as program code. However, with ML, these rules are inferred from training data (i.e., they are generated inductively). This paradigm shift in application development makes it difficult to reason about the behavior of software systems with ML components. This talk will explore how mining software repositories techniques can help support the quality assurance of AI-empowered software systems, and discuss some potential research avenues on this topic.
Bio: Foutse Khomh is a Full Professor of Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada CIFAR AI Chair on Trustworthy Machine Learning Software Systems, and FRQ-IVADO Research Chair on Software Quality Assurance for Machine Learning Applications. He received a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of Montreal in 2011, with the Award of Excellence. He also received a CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize for 2019. His research interests include software maintenance and evolution, machine learning systems engineering, cloud engineering, and dependable and trustworthy ML/AI. His work has received four ten-year Most Influential Paper (MIP) Awards, and six Best/Distinguished Paper Awards. He also served on the steering committee of SANER (chair), MSR, PROMISE, ICPC (chair), and ICSME (vice-chair). He initiated and co-organized the Software Engineering for Machine Learning Applications (SEMLA) symposium and the RELENG (Release Engineering) workshop series. He is co-founder of the NSERC CREATE SE4AI: A Training Program on the Development, Deployment, and Servicing of Artificial Intelligence-based Software Systems, and one of the Principal Investigators of the DEpendable Explainable Learning (DEEL) project. He is on the editorial board of multiple international software engineering journals and is a Senior Member of IEEE.