Blog

12 November 2018 - Lessons Learned in Migrating from Swing to JavaFX

We describe our experience with the migration of a diagramming tool written in Java from Swing to JavaFX. The experience led to unexpected realizations about the impact of differences in framework design and documentation.

1 November 2018 - The 39th ICSE, 2017

Electronic version of the Chapter 39 in the book "40 Editions of ICSE". We discuss our attempts to retain the conference’s standards while tackling the reviewing load, to increase conference attendance, and to ensure that the Latin American software engineering community benefited.

22 October 2018 - Exchanging Threats to Validity

If the Threats section in software engineering paper is here to stay, let's give it a fair shake. Individual Threats sections vary wildly in terms of quality. How can we efficiently improve the standard?

6 November 2017 - On-Demand Developer Documentation

About anyone who develops with software technology will need some sort of documentation. The only problem is that producing it cost-efficiently is mission impossible.

10 February 2017 - Sustainable Software Design

Why don't we explicitly consider how expensive a particular design decision will be to capture and maintain consitent with the code, before adopting it?

17 June 2016 - Essay-Style Documents on Software Architecture

What is the best way to capture architectural knowledge? There probably isn't any one answer to that question, but there are certainly many answers to the question of how project teams currently capture this kind of knowledge...

15 April 2016 - ICSE Reviews: A Free but Limited Resource

The ICSE 2017 Call for Research Papers is out, and there has been some discussion on social media and through email on the fact that submissions to the research track are limited to three papers per author...

27 December 2015 - Attending Classes for Communion

If a university class is video-recorded, why bother showing up? Celebrated Canadian playwright Robert Lepage might have one answer: to commune, and be an influential part of the academic picture...

29 April 2015 - Uttering Threats to Validity

One of the reviews for my ICSE 2015 submission included the demand: "There is no threats to validity or limitation section. Please add this." When reporting on research results, it is of course necessary to state and discuss decisions of the experimental design that have major repercussions on how the results can be interpreted...

28 November 2014 - Summarizing Qualitative Evidence with Spark-Histograms

When reporting on data analyzed using a qualitative research approach, a major challenge is to properly indicate the nature and amount of the evidence that support a given observation...

15 October 2014 - Code Examples: Less is More, but What Should We Chop Off?

A lot of the documents we need to understand and use software technologies include code examples... To decide whether to study a code example in detail, it's useful to have a summary of what it's about, just like for any other document. But most techniques for summarizing "normal" documents don't apply to code...

8 August 2014 - Embracing Discrimination (in API Documentation)

A flat (non-hierarchical) content presentation mostly assumes the reader wants to read everything sequentially. This assumption is fine for suspenseful novels, but it crumples in the case of API documentation...

26 June 2014 - Good Practices for Software Analytics Papers

Much effort is currently invested to increase our understanding of software development by analyzing large data sets [...]. This type of effort is now known as Software Analytics [...]. We [provide] a list of desirable practices for reporting on software analytics projects.

12 May 2014 - APIs: What Should We Document (and Not Document)?

APIs are not always self-explanatory, so we need to complement them with documentation for better usability...But how do we do that? ...