Estimating how long it will take to complete a task is hard work, and the most common motivation for this work comes from external factors, e.g., the boss, or a potential client asks for an estimate to do a job. People also make estimates for their own use, e.... [Read more...]

The Projects chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book has been reworked; draft pdf available here. A lot of developers spend their time working on projects, and there ought to be loads of data available. But, as we all know, few companies measure anything, and fewer hang on to the ... [Read more...]

The Projects chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book has been reworked; draft pdf available here. A lot of developers spend their time working on projects, and there ought to be loads of data available. But, as we all know, few companies measure anything, and fewer hang on to the ... [Read more...]

The Ecosystems chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book has been reworked (I have given up on the idea that this second pass is also where the polishing happens; polishing still needs to happen, and there might be more material migration between chapters); download here. I have been reading books ... [Read more...]

During a search for data on programming language usage I discovered Stack Overflow Trends, showing an interesting plot of language tags appearing on Stack Overflow questions (see below). Where was the csv file for these numbers? Somebody had asked this question last year, but there were no answers. The graphic ... [Read more...]

The process used to generate the pdf of my evidence-based software engineering book has been on my list of things to blog about, for ever. An email arrived this afternoon, asking how I produced various effects using Asciidoc; this post probably contains rather more than N. Psaris wanted to know. ... [Read more...]

I am someone who regularly uses R, and my interest in programming languages means that on a semi-regular basis spend time reading blog posts about the language. Over the last year, or so, I had noticed several patterns of behavior, and after reading a recent blog post things started to ... [Read more...]

The Cognitive capitalism chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book took longer than expected to polish; in fact it got reworked, rather than polished (which still needs to happen, and there might be more text moving from other chapters). Changing the chapter title, from Economics to Cognitive capitalism, helped clarify ... [Read more...]

It has been just over two years since I release the first draft of the Human cognitive characteristics chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book. As new material was discovered, it got added where it seemed to belong (at the time), no effort was invested in maintaining any degree of ... [Read more...]

I have completed the polishing/correcting/fiddling of the eight statistical analysis related chapters of my evidence-based software engineering book, and an updated draft pdf is now available (download here). The material was in much better shape than I recalled, after abandoning it to the world 2-years ago, to work ... [Read more...]

So you have read my (draft) book on evidence-based software engineering and want to learn more about the statistical techniques used, but are not interested lots of detailed mathematics. What books do I suggest? All the following books are sitting on the shelf next to where I write (not that ... [Read more...]

In 2012, when I decided to write a book on evidence-based software engineering, R was the obvious system to use for data analysis. At the time, lots of new books had “using R” or “with R” added at the end of their titles; I chose “using R”. When developers tell me ... [Read more...]

The Source Code chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). This chapter has suffered from coming last and there is still lots of work to be done. Almost all the source code related data has been plundered to fill up earlier ... [Read more...]

The Reliability chapter of my Empirical software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). I have been working on this draft for four months and it still needs lots of work; time to move on and let it stew for a while. Part of the problem ... [Read more...]

The pile of papers, books and data-sets, relating to previously released draft chapters of my Empirical software engineering book, has been growing, and cluttering up my mind. I decided to have a clear-out. A couple of things stood out. There are around 25 data-sets that have been promised but not yet ... [Read more...]

The Projects chapter of my Empirical software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). This material turned out to be harder to bring together than I had expected. Building software projects is a bit like making sausages in that you don’t want to know the ... [Read more...]

The Ecosystems chapter of my Empirical software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). I don’t seem to be able to get away from rewriting everything, despite working on the software engineering material for many years. Fortunately the sparsity of the data keeps me in ... [Read more...]

Data plots can sometimes look very dull and need to be jazzed up a bit. Now, nobody’s suggesting that the important statistical properties of the data be changed, but wouldn’t it be useful if the points could be moved around a bit, to create something visually appealing without ... [Read more...]

The Economics chapter of my Empirical software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). This is a slim chapter, it might grow a bit, but I suspect not by a huge amount. Reasons include lots of interesting data being confidential and me not having spent a ... [Read more...]

A draft of my book Empirical Software Engineering using R is now available for download. The book essentially comes in two parts: statistical techniques that are useful for analyzing software engineering data. This draft release contains most of the techniques I plan to cover. I am interested in hearing about ... [Read more...]