13,356 research outputs found
Assessing technical candidates on the social web
This is the pre-print version of this Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 IEEEThe Social Web provides comprehensive and publicly available information about software developers: they can be identified as contributors to open source projects, as experts at maintaining weak ties on social network sites, or as active participants to knowledge sharing sites. These signals, when aggregated and summarized, could be used to define individual profiles of potential candidates: job seekers, even if lacking a formal degree or changing their career path, could be qualitatively evaluated by potential employers through their online
contributions. At the same time, developers are aware of the Webâs public nature and the possible uses of published information when they determine what to share with the world. Some might even try to manipulate public
signals of technical qualifications, soft skills, and reputation in their favor. Assessing candidates on the Web for
technical positions presents challenges to recruiters and traditional selection procedures; the most serious being the interpretation of the provided signals.
Through an in-depth discussion, we propose guidelines for software engineers and recruiters to help them interpret the value and trouble with the signals and metrics they use to assess a candidateâs characteristics and skills
Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2)
This technical report records and discusses the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). The report includes a description of the alternative, experimental submission and review process, two workshop keynote presentations, a series of lightning talks, a discussion on sustainability, and five discussions from the topic areas of exploring sustainability; software development experiences; credit & incentives; reproducibility & reuse & sharing; and code testing & code review. For each topic, the report includes a list of tangible actions that were proposed and that would lead to potential change. The workshop recognized that reliance on scientific software is pervasive in all areas of world-leading research today. The workshop participants then proceeded to explore different perspectives on the concept of sustainability. Key enablers and barriers of sustainable scientific software were identified from their experiences. In addition, recommendations with new requirements such as software credit files and software prize frameworks were outlined for improving practices in sustainable software engineering. There was also broad consensus that formal training in software development or engineering was rare among the practitioners. Significant strides need to be made in building a sense of community via training in software and technical practices, on increasing their size and scope, and on better integrating them directly into graduate education programs. Finally, journals can define and publish policies to improve reproducibility, whereas reviewers can insist that authors provide sufficient information and access to data and software to allow them reproduce the results in the paper. Hence a list of criteria is compiled for journals to provide to reviewers so as to make it easier to review software submitted for publication as a âSoftware Paper.
A Quantitative Study of Java Software Buildability
Researchers, students and practitioners often encounter a situation when the
build process of a third-party software system fails. In this paper, we aim to
confirm this observation present mainly as anecdotal evidence so far. Using a
virtual environment simulating a programmer's one, we try to fully
automatically build target archives from the source code of over 7,200 open
source Java projects. We found that more than 38% of builds ended in failure.
Build log analysis reveals the largest portion of errors are
dependency-related. We also conduct an association study of factors affecting
build success
Improving Software Citation and Credit
The past year has seen movement on several fronts for improving software
citation, including the Center for Open Science's Transparency and Openness
Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, the Software Publishing Special Interest Group that
was started at January's AAS meeting in Seattle at the request of that
organization's Working Group on Astronomical Software, a Sloan-sponsored
meeting at GitHub in San Francisco to begin work on a cohesive research
software citation-enabling platform, the work of Force11 to "transform and
improve" research communication, and WSSSPE's ongoing efforts that include
software publication, citation, credit, and sustainability.
Brief reports on these efforts were shared at the BoF, after which
participants discussed ideas for improving software citation, generating a list
of recommendations to the community of software authors, journal publishers,
ADS, and research authors. The discussion, recommendations, and feedback will
help form recommendations for software citation to those publishers represented
in the Software Publishing Special Interest Group and the broader community.Comment: Birds of a Feather session organized by the Astrophysics Source Code
Library (ASCL, http://ascl.net/ ); to be published in Proceedings of ADASS
XXV (Sydney, Australia; October, 2015). 4 page
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