Coordination Factors in Software Engineering

Speaker:	Dr. Christian Bird
		Microsoft Research

Title:		"Coordination Factors in Software Engineering"

Date:		Monday, 28 March 2011

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

As software continues to grow in size and complexity, so do development
teams. Consequently, coordination and communication within these teams
play larger roles in productivity and software quality. My research
focuses on the relationships between developers in large software projects
and how software affects and is affected by these relationships.
Fortunately, source code repository histories, mailing list archives, and
bug databases contain latent data from which we can reconstruct a rich
view of a project over time and analyze these sociotechnical
relationships. In this talk, I will present the results of some empirical
studies whose goal is to answer questions that can help software project
leaders understand and make decisions about their own teams: Does
geographically distributed development necessarily adversely impact
software quality? What is the effect of ownership and expertise on defects
in different process domains? Are large open source projects really
organized like bazaars or do they suffer from the effects of Brooks' Law?


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Biography:

Christian Bird is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in the
Empirical Software Engineering group.  He is primarily interested in the
relationship between software design and social dynamics in large
development projects, and the effects on productivity and software quality
and has pioneered a number of software mining techniques in an effort to
empirically answer questions in that area. He has studied software
development teams at Microsoft, IBM, and in the Open Source realm,
examining the effects of distributed development, ownership policies, and
the ways in which teams complete software tasks. He is the recipient of
the ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award, and the "Best Graduate Student
Researcher" at U.C. Davis where he received his Ph.D. under Prem Devanbu.
He has published in the top academic software engineering venues, has a
Research Highlight in CACM, and was a National Merit Scholar at BYU, where
he received his B.S. in computer science.