We Don't Need Another Hero? The Impact of "Heroes" on Software Development

A software project has "Hero Developers" when 80% of contributions are delivered by 20% of the developers. Are such heroes a good idea? Are too many heroes bad for software quality? Is it better to have more/less heroes for different kinds of projects? To answer these questions, we studied 661 open source projects from Public open source software (OSS) Github and 171 projects from an Enterprise Github. We find that hero projects are very common. In fact, as projects grow in size, nearly all project become hero projects. These findings motivated us to look more closely at the effects of heroes on software development. Analysis shows that the frequency to close issues and bugs are not significantly affected by the presence of project type (Public or Enterprise). Similarly, the time needed to resolve an issue/bug/enhancement is not affected by heroes or project type. This is a surprising result since, before looking at the data, we expected that increasing heroes on a project will slow down howfast that project reacts to change. However, we do find a statistically significant association between heroes, project types, and enhancement resolution rates. Heroes do not affect enhancement resolution rates in Public projects. However, in Enterprise projects, the more heroes increase the rate at which project complete enhancements. In summary, our empirical results call for a revision of a long-held truism in software engineering. Software heroes are far more common and valuable than suggested by the literature, particularly for medium to large Enterprise developments. Organizations should reflect on better ways to find and retain more of these heroesComment: 8 pages + 1 references, Accepted to International conference on Software Engineering - Software Engineering in Practice, 201

A comparison of model validation techniques for audio-visual speech recognition

This paper implements and compares the performance of a number of techniques proposed for improving the accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. As ASR that uses only speech can be contaminated by environmental noise, in some applications it may improve performance to employ Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR), in which recognition uses both audio information and mouth movements obtained from a video recording of the speaker’s face region. In this paper, model validation techniques, namely the holdout method, leave-one-out cross validation and bootstrap validation, are implemented to validate the performance of an AVSR system as well as to provide a comparison of the performance of the validation techniques themselves. A new speech data corpus is used, namely the Loughborough University Audio-Visual (LUNA-V) dataset that contains 10 speakers with five sets of samples uttered by each speaker. The database is divided into training and testing sets and processed in manners suitable for the validation techniques under investigation. The performance is evaluated using a range of different signal-to-noise ratio values using a variety of noise types obtained from the NOISEX-92 dataset

Data mining for software engineering and humans in the loop

The field of data mining for software engineering has been growing over the last decade. This field is concerned with the use of data mining to provide useful insights into how to improve software engineering processes and software itself, supporting decision-making. For that, data produced by software engineering processes and products during and after software development are used. Despite promising results, there is frequently a lack of discussion on the role of software engineering practitioners amidst the data mining approaches. This makes adoption of data mining by software engineering practitioners difficult. Moreover, the fact that experts’ knowledge is frequently ignored by data mining approaches, together with the lack of transparency of such approaches, can hinder the acceptability of data mining by software engineering practitioners. To overcome these problems, this position paper provides a discussion of the role of software engineering experts when adopting data mining approaches. It also argues that this role can be extended to increase experts’ involvement in the process of building data mining models. We believe that such extended involvement is not only likely to increase software engineers’ acceptability of the resulting models, but also improve the models themselves. We also provide some recommendations aimed at increasing the success of experts involvement and model acceptability

Empowering Software Engineering with Artificial Intelligence

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. A huge amount of data is constantly generated from the development, maintenance and operation of software products. Buried under this Big Data is insight and patterns that are valuable to the management and development of software projects. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) empowers us to develop next-generation analytics methods to transform software engineering in both quality and productivity. This paper outlines a vision where cutting-edge AI machine learning techniques can be leveraged to develop new data-driven, automated methods for software effort estimation, code patch formulation and risk prediction, all of which are in the context of modern software development settings

A Novel Automated Approach for Software Effort Estimation Based on Data Augmentation

Software effort estimation (SEE) usually suffers from data scarcity problem due to the expensive or long process of data collection. As a result, companies usually have limited projects for effort estimation, causing unsatisfactory prediction performance. Few studies have investigated strategies to generate additional SEE data to aid such learning. We aim to propose a synthetic data generator to address the data scarcity problem of SEE. Our synthetic generator enlarges the SEE data set size by slightly displacing some randomly chosen training examples. It can be used with any SEE method as a data preprocessor. Its effectiveness is justified with 6 state-of-the-art SEE models across 14 SEE data sets. We also compare our data generator against the only existing approach in the SEE literature. Experimental results show that our synthetic projects can significantly improve the performance of some SEE methods especially when the training data is insufficient. When they cannot significantly improve the prediction performance, they are not detrimental either. Besides, our synthetic data generator is significantly superior or perform similarly to its competitor in the SEE literature. Therefore, our data generator plays a non-harmful if not significantly beneficial effect on the SEE methods investigated in this paper. Therefore, it is helpful in addressing the data scarcity problem of SEE