Software engineering

Code review is an essential task for modern software engineers, where the author of a code change assigns other engineers the task of providing feedback on the author’s code. In this paper, we investigate the task of code review through the lens of equity, the proposition that engineers should share reviewing responsibilities fairly. Through this lens, we quantitatively examine gender...

The execution behavior of a program often depends on external resources, such as program inputs or file contents, and so cannot be run in isolation. Nevertheless, software developers benefit from fast iteration loops where automated tools identify errors as early as possible, even before programs can be compiled and run. This presents an interesting machine learning challenge: can we predict...

Measuring the productivity of software developers is inherently difficult; it requires measuring humans doing a complex, creative task. They are affected by both technological and sociological aspects of their job, and these need to be evaluated in concert to deeply understand developer productivity.

When a change introduces a bug into a large software repository, there is often a delay between when the change is committed and when bug is detected. This is true even when the bug causes an existing test to fail! These delays are caused by resource constraints which prevent the organization from running all of the tests on every change. Due to the delay, a Continuous Integration system needs...