14,436 research outputs found
The effects of change decomposition on code review -- a controlled experiment
Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming
process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets
into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process.
So far, literature provided no quantitative analysis of this hypothesis.
Aims: (1) Quantitatively measure the effects of change decomposition on the
outcome of code review (in terms of number of found defects, wrongly reported
issues, suggested improvements, time, and understanding); (2) Qualitatively
analyze how subjects approach the review and navigate the code, building
knowledge and addressing existing issues, in large vs. decomposed changes.
Method: Controlled experiment using the pull-based development model
involving 28 software developers among professionals and graduate students.
Results: Change decomposition leads to fewer wrongly reported issues,
influences how subjects approach and conduct the review activity (by increasing
context-seeking), yet impacts neither understanding the change rationale nor
the number of found defects.
Conclusions: Change decomposition reduces the noise for subsequent data
analyses but also significantly supports the tasks of the developers in charge
of reviewing the changes. As such, commits belonging to different concepts
should be separated, adopting this as a best practice in software engineering
STV-based Video Feature Processing for Action Recognition
In comparison to still image-based processes, video features can provide rich and intuitive information about dynamic events occurred over a period of time, such as human actions, crowd behaviours, and other subject pattern changes. Although substantial progresses have been made in the last decade on image processing and seen its successful applications in face matching and object recognition, video-based event detection still remains one of the most difficult challenges in computer vision research due to its complex continuous or discrete input signals, arbitrary dynamic feature definitions, and the often ambiguous analytical methods. In this paper, a Spatio-Temporal Volume (STV) and region intersection (RI) based 3D shape-matching method has been proposed to facilitate the definition and recognition of human actions recorded in videos. The distinctive characteristics and the performance gain of the devised approach stemmed from a coefficient factor-boosted 3D region intersection and matching mechanism developed in this research. This paper also reported the investigation into techniques for efficient STV data filtering to reduce the amount of voxels (volumetric-pixels) that need to be processed in each operational cycle in the implemented system. The encouraging features and improvements on the operational performance registered in the experiments have been discussed at the end
Amplifying Quiet Voices: Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design at an Urban Scale
Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design activities are somewhat limited. In this paper, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a smart city project. Through analysing the nature of citizensâ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising participatory design at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city
Recommended from our members
A systematic review of software development cost estimation studies
This paper aims to provide a basis for the improvement of software estimation research through a systematic review of previous work. The review identifies 304 software cost estimation papers in 76 journals and classifies the papers according to research topic, estimation approach, research approach, study context and data set. A web-based library of these cost estimation papers is provided to ease the identification of relevant estimation research results. The review results combined with other knowledge provide support for recommendations for future software cost estimation research, including: 1) Increase the breadth of the search for relevant studies, 2) Search manually for relevant papers within a carefully selected set of journals when completeness is essential, 3) Conduct more studies on estimation methods commonly used by the software industry, and, 4) Increase the awareness of how properties of the data sets impact the results when evaluating estimation methods
- âŚ