Sunday, June 30, 2013

Sensing high performance software teams

Interesting article on measuring team performance

The article shows a design of a survey that would help to continuously monitor software teams and their performance. Sounds a bit like the old fashioned PSP or TSP, but might actually work. Looking forward to more case studies with this method. 

The article contains two case studies, but more wild be welcomed and their more thorough analysis together with the proper description of the center would be great. 

Clone detection at Microsoft

Detecting clones at Microsoft seems to be a planned and well executed activity...

I was looking at the clone detection research recently and found a new development from Microsoft. It seems that the company puts a lot of effort to reduce the waste in their source code and work with refactoring. They report an impressive number of downloads if the tool and show why they use it. 

Unfortunately no real results of how much improvement was introduced thanks to the tool. Perhaps that will come later. 

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Review of thesis on measuring sw architectures...

Measuring sw architectures
http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~bouwers/main/papers/2013thesis_EricBouwers.pdf

I came across this thesis and found a nice part about measuring architectures. Interesting reading about metrics and their connection to steering people somewhere in the middle too.


Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Code smells as system-level indicators of maintainability: An Empirical Study

Code smells as system-level indicators of maintainability: An Empirical Study
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2013.05.007

Aiko did a very interesting study on code smells - they've compared a number of systems that had been studied previously and evaluated using CK metrics and expert judgements. The new evaluations was based on code smells.

The results are interesting in that sense that code smells are strongly correlated with expert judgements on the quality of the code. This means that code smells can be used as indicators of the well-known "gut feeling" from experts. However, more quantitative.

Very interesting and recommended reading!

@MiroslawStaron

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Metrics suite to measure Agile transformation...

Metrics for Agile transformation

In this article the authors elicit a number of metrics for measuring the effect of changes to software development processes from plan driven to agile. The metrics are not really a set of surprises (sorry) but I like the framework in which they are defined. 

The framework tries to capture what can go right and what can go wrong in a transformation and thus puts metrics I the context. I just wish the authors would use ISO 15939 instead of GQM. 

Examples of metrics are: 
- business value measured in connection to work effort, 
- commit pulse
- flow (Hej I know this one) 
...