Experienced Pair Programmers Write Better Code

According to a recent study by Andreas Höfer, experienced pair programmers write better code than novice pair programmers. This is in line with a study by Hannay et al. from last year where the researchers found that experience was a key performance predictor in pair programming. It is interesting to…

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Extroverted programmers?

Have you ever heard the phrase: “I don’t want to be an engineer, I want to work with people!” I have heard it so many times. In my experience engineering jobs are all about working with people. But others disagree

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In the mail from Google Scholar

Going through my alerts from Google Scholar today, I found a few gems which I plan to write more about when and if I manage to obtain copies of the works in question. There is ever the problem of gaining access to some research… Cross sectional study of agile software…

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Search based software engineering 10 years

Apparently, Search Based Software Engineering or SBSE celebrates 10 years as a research area this year. A bibliometric analysis of 740 contributions was recently published in honor of this landmark. I wonder if my own small contribution is included there? References [bibtex file=http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/greger/tag/20110831a?fieldmap=posted-at:posted-date&clean_urls=0]

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Selecting a Requirements Engineering Tool

Choosing the ring. An oil painting.

Selecting a requirements engineering tool has always been a pain for me. Personally I have had experience with Rational CQ, Rational ReqPro, Jira, CodeBeamer and finally Excel. Requirements Engineering Model I would say that a thorough evaluation of an RE tool starts with your own clear vision of how to…

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Success Factors for Outsourcing Companies

An empty callcenter after a successful outsourcing?

Two days ago, I wrote about the kind of adversarial relationship possibly implicit in using requirements. I have started looking for research on what that relationship looks like and one of the first articles I came up with was a recent (April 2011) systematic literature review on success factors for…

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Should you automate you release planning?

According to this study you should because expert release planning is 40% less efficient than automated planning. However this is only for simulated projects. In their next work the researchers will try the approach on real project data…

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How Information Gets Stolen

I just found a very interesting article from the software engineering institute on how information gets stolen by insiders. Did you know that: E-mail is the most common method of exfiltration. Almost all thieves are men. Most information thieves steal from IT and telecom company. Most thefts happen within 30…

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Large Software Projects and Education

Students record a Radio Show with AudioBoo

We all know that many real life software projects are large. Some are even obscenly large. But in universities students engage in smaller projects or as individual contributors. Can and should software engineering education be made more realistic in that students work in large scale projects? In “A Software Engineering…

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Does Agile lead to secure software?

According to some Norwegian researchers, agile software development in small and medium sized enterprises does not result in more secure software. Their solution is to make some ‘extensions’ to agile development methodology. I am sceptical. I think it would be a matter of how the agile methods are applied not…

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