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The impact of believability on reasoning performance

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

What are the processes involved in reasoning? While philosophers have been thinking about this question for several thousand years, psychologists have been running human reasoning experiments for less than a hundred years (things took off in the late 1960s with the Wason selection task).

Reasoning is a crucial ability for software developers, and I thought that there would be lots to learn from the cognitive psychologists research into reasoning. After buying all the books, and reading lots of papers, I realised that the subject was mostly convoluted rabbit holes individually constructed by tiny groups of researchers. The field of decision-making is where those psychologists interested in reasoning, and a connection to reality, hang-out.

Is there anything that can be learned from research into human reasoning (other than that different people appear to use different techniques, and some problems are more likely to involve particular techniques)?

A consistent result from experiments involving syllogistic reasoning is that subjects are more likely to agree that a conclusion they find believable follows from the premise (and are more likely to disagree with a conclusion they find unbelievable). The following is perhaps the most famous syllogism (the first two lines are known as the premise, and the last line is the conclusion):

    All men are mortal.
    Socrates is a man.
    Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Would anybody other than a classically trained scholar consider that a form of logic invented by Aristotle provides a reasonable basis for evaluating reasoning performance?

Given the importance of reasoning ability in software development, there ought to be some selection pressure on those who regularly write software, e.g., software developers ought to give a higher percentage of correct answers to reasoning problems than the general population. If the selection pressure for reasoning ability is not that great, at least software developers have had a lot more experience solving this kind of problem, and practice should improve performance.

The subjects in most psychology experiments are psychology undergraduates studying in the department of the researcher running the experiment, i.e., not the general population. Psychology is a numerate discipline, or at least the components I have read up on have a numeric orientation, and I have met a fair few psychology researchers who are decent programmers. Psychology undergraduates must have an above general-population performance on syllogism problems, but better than professional developers? I don’t think so, but then I may be biased.

A study by Winiger, Singmann, and Kellen asked subjects to specify whether the conclusion of a syllogism was valid/invalid/don’t know. The syllogisms used were some combination of valid/invalid and believable/unbelievable; examples below:

        Believable                  Unbelievable
Valid
        No oaks are jubs.           No trees are punds.
        Some trees are jubs.        Some Oaks are punds.
        Therefore, some trees       Therefore, some oaks
                   are not oaks.               are not trees.
Invalid
        No tree are brops.          No oaks are foins.
        Some oaks are brops.        Some trees are foins.
        Therefore, some trees       Therefore, some oaks
                   are not oaks.               are not trees.

The experiment was run using an online crowdsource site, and 354 data sets were obtained.

The plot below shows the impact of conclusion believability (red)/unbelievability (blue/green) on subject performance, when deciding whether a syllogism was valid (left) or invalid (right), (code+data):

Benchmark runtime at various array sizes, for each algorithm using a 32-bit datatype.

The believability of the conclusion biases the responses away/towards the correct answer (the error bars are tiny, and have not been plotted). Building a regression model puts numbers to the difference, and information on the kind of premise can also be included in the model.

Do professional developers exhibit such a large response bias (I would expect their average performance to be better)?

People tend to write fewer negative tests, than positive tests. Is this behavior related to the believability that certain negative events can occur?

Believability is an underappreciated coding issue.

Hopefully people will start doing experiments to investigate this issue :-)

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Code bureaucracy can reduce the demand for cognitive resources

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A few weeks ago I discussed why I thought that research code was likely to remain a tangled mess of spaghetti code.

Everybody’s writing, independent of work-place, starts out as a tangled mess of spaghetti code; some people learn to write code in a less cognitively demanding style, and others stick with stream-of-conscious writing.

Why is writing a tangled mess of spaghetti code (sometimes) not cost-effective, and what are the benefits in making a personal investment in learning to write code in another style?

Perhaps the defining characteristic of a tangled mess of spaghetti code is that everything appears to depend on everything else, consequently: working out the impact of a change to some sequence of code requires an understanding of all the other code (to find out what really does depend on what).

When first starting to learn to program, the people who can hold the necessary information on increasing amounts of code in their head are the ones who manage to create running (of sorts) programs; they have the ‘knack’.

The limiting factor for an individual’s software development is the amount of code they can fit in their head, while going about their daily activities. The metric ‘code that can be fitted in a person’s head’ is an easy concept to grasp, but its definition in terms of the cognitive capacity to store, combine and analyse information in long term memory and the episodic memory of earlier work is difficult to pin down. The reason people live a monks existence when single-handedly writing 30-100 KLOC spaghetti programs (the C preprocessor Richard Stallman wrote for gcc is a good example), is that they have to shut out all other calls on their cognitive resources.

Given time, and the opportunity for some trial and error, a newbie programmer who does not shut their non-coding life down can create, say, a 1,000+ LOC program. Things work well enough, what is the problem?

The problems start when the author stops working on the code for long enough for them to forget important dependencies; making changes to the code now causes things to mysteriously stop working. Our not so newbie programmer now has to go through the frustrating and ego-denting experience of reacquainting themselves with how the code fits together.

There are ways of organizing code such that less cognitive resources are needed to work on it, compared to a tangled mess of spaghetti code. Every professional developer has a view on how best to organize code, what they all have in common is a lack of evidence for their performance relative to other possibilities.

Code bureaucracy does not sound like something that anybody would want to add to their program, but it succinctly describes the underlying principle of all the effective organizational techniques for code.

Bureaucracy compartmentalizes code and arranges the compartments into some form of hierarchy. The hoped-for benefit of this bureaucracy is a reduction in the cognitive resources needed to work on the code. Compartmentalization can significantly reduce the amount of a program’s code that a developer needs to keep in their head, when working on some functionality. It is possible for code to be compartmentalized in a way that requires even more cognitive resources to implement some functionality than without the bureaucracy. Figuring out the appropriate bureaucracy is a skill that comes with practice and knowledge of the application domain.

Once a newbie programmer is up and running (i.e., creating programs that work well enough), they often view the code bureaucracy approach as something that does not apply to them (and if they rarely write code, it might not apply to them). Stream of conscious coding works for them, why change?

I have seen people switch to using code bureaucracy for two reasons:

  • peer pressure. They join a group of developers who develop using some form of code bureaucracy, and their boss tells them that this is the way they have to work. In this case there is the added benefit of being able to discuss things with others,
  • multiple experiences of the costs of failure. The costs may come from the failure to scale a program beyond some amount of code, or having to keep investing in learning how previously written programs work.

Code bureaucracy has many layers. At the bottom there is splitting code up into functions/methods, then at the next layer related functions are collected together into files/classes, then the layers become less generally agreed upon (different directories are often involved).

One of the benefits of bureaucracy, from the management perspective, is interchangeability of people. Why would somebody make an investment in code bureaucracy if they were not the one likely to reap the benefit?

A claimed benefit of code bureaucracy is ease of wholesale replacement of one compartment by a new one. My experience, along with the little data I have seen, suggests that major replacement is rare, i.e., this is not a commonly accrued benefit.

Another claimed benefit of code bureaucracy is that it makes programs easier to test. What does ‘easier to test’ mean? I have seen reliable programs built from spaghetti code, and unreliable programs packed with code bureaucracy. A more accurate claim is that it can be unexpectedly costly to test programs built from spaghetti code after they have been changed (because of the greater likelihood of the changes having unexpected consequences). A surprising number of programs built from spaghetti code continue to be used in unmodified form for years, because nobody dare risk the cost of checking that they continue to work as expected after a modification

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Fitting discontinuous data from disparate sources

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Sorting and searching are probably the most widely performed operations in computing; they are extensively covered in volume 3 of The Art of Computer Programming. Algorithm performance is influence by the characteristics of the processor on which it runs, and the size of the processor cache(s) has a significant impact on performance.

A study by Khuong and Morin investigated the performance of various search algorithms on 46 different processors. Khuong kindly sent me a copy of the raw data; the study webpage includes lots of plots.

The performance comparison involved 46 processors (mostly Intel x86 compatible cpus, plus a few ARM cpus) times 3 array datatypes times 81 array sizes times 28 search algorithms. First a 32/64/128-bit array of unsigned integers containing N elements was initialized with known values. The benchmark iterated 2-million times around randomly selecting one of the known values, and then searching for it using the algorithm under test. The time taken to iterate 2-million times was recorded. This was repeated for the 81 values of N, up to 63,095,734, on each of the 46 processors.

The plot below shows the results of running each algorithm benchmarked (colored lines) on an Intel Atom D2700 @ 2.13GHz, for 32-bit array elements; the kink in the lines occur roughly at the point where the size of the array exceeds the cache size (all code+data):

Benchmark runtime at various array sizes, for each algorithm using a 32-bit datatype.

What is the most effective way of analyzing the measurements to produce consistent results?

One approach is to build two regression models, one for the measurements before the cache ‘kink’ and one for the measurements after this kink. By adding in a dummy variable at the kink-point, it is possible to merge these two models into one model. The problem with this approach is that the kink-point has to be chosen in advance. The plot shows that the performance kink occurs before the array size exceeds the cache size; other variables are using up some of the cache storage.

This approach requires fitting 46*3=138 models (I think the algorithm used can be integrated into the model).

If data from lots of processors is to be fitted, or the three datatypes handled, an automatic way of picking where the first regression model should end, and where the second regression model should start is needed.

Regression discontinuity design looks like it might be applicable; treating the point where the array size exceeds the cache size as the discontinuity. Traditionally discontinuity designs assume a sharp discontinuity, which is not the case for these benchmarks (R’s rdd package worked for one algorithm, one datatype running on one processor); the more recent continuity-based approach supports a transition interval before/after the discontinuity. The R package rdrobust supports a continued-based approach, but seems to expect the discontinuity to be a change of intercept, rather than a change of slope (or rather, I could not figure out how to get it to model a just change of slope; suggestions welcome).

Another approach is to use segmented regression, i.e., one of more distinct lines. The package segmented supports fitting this kind of model, and does estimate what they call the breakpoint (the user has to provide a first estimate).

I managed to fit a segmented model that included all the algorithms for 32-bit data, running on one processor (code+data). Looking at the fitted model I am not hopeful that adding data from more than one processor would produce something that contained useful information. I suspect that there are enough irregular behaviors in the benchmark runs to throw off fitting quality.

I’m always asking for more data, and now I have more data than I know how to analyze in a way that does not require me to build 100+ models :-(

Suggestions welcome.

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Research software code is likely to remain a tangled mess

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Research software (i.e., software written to support research in engineering or the sciences) is usually a tangled mess of spaghetti code that only the author knows how to use. Very occasionally I encounter well organized research software that can be used without having an email conversation with the author (who has invariably spent years iterating through many versions).

Spaghetti code is not unique to academia, there is plenty to be found in industry.

Structural differences between academia and industry make it likely that research software will always be a tangled mess, only usable by the person who wrote it. These structural differences include:

  • writing software is a low status academic activity; it is a low status activity in some companies, but those involved don’t commonly have other higher status tasks available to work on. Why would a researcher want to invest in becoming proficient in a low status activity? Why would the principal investigator spend lots of their grant money hiring a proficient developer to work on a low status activity?

    I think the lack of status is rooted in researchers’ lack of appreciation of the effort and skill needed to become a proficient developer of software. Software differs from that other essential tool, mathematics, in that most researchers have spent many years studying mathematics and understand that effort/skill is needed to be able to use it.

    Academic performance is often measured using citations, and there is a growing move towards citing software,

  • many of those writing software know very little about how to do it, and don’t have daily contact with people who do. Recent graduates are the pool from which many new researchers are drawn. People in industry are intimately familiar with the software development skills of recent graduates, i.e., the majority are essentially beginners; most developers in industry were once recent graduates, and the stream of new employees reminds them of the skill level of such people. Academics see a constant stream of people new to software development, this group forms the norm they have to work within, and many don’t appreciate the skill gulf that exists between a recent graduate and an experienced software developer,
  • paid a lot less. The handful of very competent software developers I know working in engineering/scientific research are doing it for their love of the engineering/scientific field in which they are active. Take this love away, and they will find that not only does industry pay better, but it also provides lots of interesting projects for them to work on (academics often have the idea that all work in industry is dull).

    I have met people who have taken jobs writing research software to learn about software development, to make themselves more employable outside academia.

Does it matter that the source code of research software is a tangled mess?

The author of a published paper is supposed to provide enough information to enable their work to be reproduced. It is very unlikely that I would be able to reproduce the results in a chemistry or genetics paper, because I don’t know enough about the subject, i.e., I am not skilled in the art. Given a tangled mess of source code, I think I could reproduce the results in the associated paper (assuming the author was shipping the code associated with the paper; I have encountered cases where this was not true). If the code failed to build correctly, I could figure out (eventually) what needed to be fixed. I think people have an unrealistic expectation that research code should just build out of the box. It takes a lot of work by a skilled person to create to build portable software that just builds.

Is it really cost-effective to insist on even a medium-degree of buildability for research software?

I suspect that the lifetime of source code used in research is just as short and lonely as it is in other domains. One study of 214 packages associated with papers published between 2001-2015 found that 73% had not been updated since publication.

I would argue that a more useful investment would be in testing that the software behaves as expected. Many researchers I have spoken to have not appreciated the importance of testing. A common misconception is that because the mathematics is correct, the software must be correct (completely ignoring the possibility of silly coding mistakes, which everybody makes). Commercial software has the benefit of user feedback, for detecting some incorrect failures. Research software may only ever have one user.

Research software engineer is the fancy title now being applied to people who write the software used in research. Originally this struck me as an example of what companies do when they cannot pay people more, they give them a fancy title. Recently the Society of Research Software Engineering was setup. This society could certainly help with training, but I don’t see it making much difference with regard status and salary.

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Performance impact of comments on tasks taking a few minutes

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

How cost-effective is an investment in commenting code?

Answering this question requires knowing the time needed to write the comment and the time they save for later readers of the code.

A recent study investigated the impact of comments in small programming tasks on developer performance, and Sebastian Nielebock, the first author, kindly sent me a copy of the data.

How might the performance impact of comments be measured?

The obvious answer is to ask subjects to solve a coding problem, with half the subjects working with code containing comments and the other half the same code without the comments. This study used three kinds of commenting: No comments, Implementation comments and Documentation comments; the source was in Java.

Were the comments in the experiment useful, in the sense of providing information that was likely to save readers some time? A preliminary run was used to check that the comments provided some benefit.

The experiment was designed to be short enough that most subjects could complete it in less than an hour (average time to complete all tasks was 31 minutes). My own experience with running experiments is that it is possible to get professional developers to donate an hour of their time.

What is a realistic and experimentally useful amount of work to ask developers to in an hour?

The authors asked subjects to complete 9-tasks; three each of applying the code (i.e., use the code’s API), fix a bug in the code, and extend the code. Would a longer version of one of each, rather than a shorter three of each been better? I think the only way to find out is to try it both ways (I hope the authors plan to do another version).

What were the results (code+data)?

Regular readers will know, from other posts discussing experiments, that the biggest factor is likely to be subject (professional developers+students) differences, and this is true here.

Based on a fitted regression model, Documentation comments slowed performance on a task by 30 seconds, compared to No comments and Implementation comments (which both had the same performance impact). Given that average task completion time was 205 seconds, this is a 15% slowdown for Documentation comments.

This study set out to measure the performance impact of comments on small programming tasks. The answer, at least for tasks designed to take a few minutes, is that No comments, or if comments are required, then write Implementation comments.

This experiment measured the performance impact of comments on developers who did not write the code containing them. These developers have to first read and understand the comments (which takes time). However, the evidence suggests that code is mostly modified by the developer who wrote it (just reading the code does not leave a record that can be analysed). In this case, the reading a comment (that the developer previously wrote) can trigger existing memories, i.e., it has a greater information content for the original author.

Will comments have a bigger impact when read by the person who wrote them (and the code), or on tasks taking more than a few minutes? I await the results of more experiments…

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Widely used programming languages: past, present, and future

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Programming languages are like pop groups in that they have followers, fans and supporters; new ones are constantly being created and some eventually become widely popular, while those that were once popular slowly fade away or mutate into something else.

Creating a language is a relatively popular activity. Science fiction and fantasy authors have been doing it since before computers existed, e.g., the Elf language Quenya devised by Tolkien, and in the computer age Star Trek’s Klingon. Some very good how-to books have been written on the subject.

As soon as computers became available, people started inventing programming languages.

What have been the major factors influencing the growth to widespread use of a new programming languages (I’m ignoring languages that become widespread within application niches)?

Cobol and Fortran became widely used because there was widespread implementation support for them across computer manufacturers, and they did not have to compete with any existing widely used languages. Various niches had one or more languages that were widely used in that niche, e.g., Algol 60 in academia.

To become widely used during the mainframe/minicomputer age, a new language first had to be ported to the major computers of the day, whose products sometimes supported multiple, incompatible operating systems. No new languages became widely used, in the sense of across computer vendors. Some new languages were widely used by developers, because they were available on IBM computers; for several decades a large percentage of developers used IBM computers. Based on job adverts, RPG was widely used, but PL/1 not so. The use of RPG declined with the decline of IBM.

The introduction of microcomputers (originally 8-bit, then 16, then 32, and finally 64-bit) opened up an opportunity for new languages to become widely used in that niche (which would eventually grow to be the primary computing platform of its day). This opportunity occurred because compiler vendors for the major languages of the day did not want to cannibalize their existing market (i.e., selling compilers for a lot more than the price of a microcomputer) by selling a much lower priced product on microcomputers.

BASIC became available on practically all microcomputers, or rather some dialect of BASIC that was incompatible with all the other dialects. The availability of BASIC on a vendor’s computer promoted sales of the hardware, and it was not worthwhile for the major vendors to create a version of BASIC that reduced portability costs; the profit was in games.

The dominance of the Microsoft/Intel partnership removed the high cost of porting to lots of platforms (by driving them out of business), but created a major new obstacle to the wide adoption of new languages: Developer choice. There had always been lots of new languages floating around, but people only got to see the subset that were available on the particular hardware they targeted. Once the cpu/OS (essentially) became a monoculture most new languages had to compete for developer attention in one ecosystem.

Pascal was in widespread use for a few years on micros (in the form of Turbo Pascal) and university computers (the source of Wirth’s ETH compiler was freely available for porting), but eventually C won developer mindshare and became the most widely used language. In the early 1990s C++ compiler sales took off, but many developers were writing C with a few C++ constructs scattered about the code (e.g., use of new, rather than malloc/free).

Next, the Internet took off, and opened up an opportunity for new languages to become dominant. This opportunity occurred because Internet related software was being made freely available, and established compiler vendors were not interested in making their products freely available.

There were people willing to invest in creating a good-enough implementation of the language they had invented, and giving it away for free. Luck, plus being in the right place at the right time resulted in PHP and Javascript becoming widely used. Network effects prevent any other language becoming widely used. Compatible dialects of PHP and Javascript may migrate widespread usage to quite different languages over time, e.g., Facebook’s Hack.

Java rode to popularity on the coat-tails of the Internet, and when it looked like security issues would reduce it to niche status, it became the vendor supported language for one of the major smart-phone OSs.

Next, smart-phones took off, but the availability of Open Source compilers closed the opportunity window for new languages to become dominant through lack of interest from existing compiler vendors. Smart-phone vendors wanted to quickly attract developers, which meant throwing their weight behind a language that many developers were already familiar with; Apple went with Objective-C (which evolved to Swift), Google with Java (which evolved to Kotlin, because of the Oracle lawsuit).

Where does Python fit in this grand scheme? I don’t yet have an answer, or is my world-view wrong to treat Python usage as being as widespread as C/C++/Java?

New programming languages continue to be implemented; I don’t see this ever stopping. Most don’t attract more users than their implementer, but a few become fashionable amongst the young, who are always looking to attach themselves to something new and shiny.

Will a new programming language ever again become widely used?

Like human languages, programming languages experience strong networking effects. Widely used languages continue to be widely used because many companies depend on code written in it, and many developers who can use it can obtain jobs; what company wants to risk using a new language only to find they cannot hire staff who know it, and there are not many people willing to invest in becoming fluent in a language with no immediate job prospects.

Today’s widely used programmings languages succeeded in a niche that eventually grew larger than all the other computing ecosystems. The Internet and smart-phones are used by everybody on the planet, there are no bigger ecosystems to provide new languages with a possible route to widespread use. To be widely used a language first has to become fashionable, but from now on, new programming languages that don’t evolve from (i.e., be compatible with) current widely used languages are very unlikely to migrate from fashionable to widely used.

It has always been possible for a proficient developer to dedicate a year+ of effort to create a new language implementation. Adding the polish need to make it production ready used to take much longer, but these days tool chains such as LLVM supply a lot of the heavy lifting. The problem for almost all language creators/implementers is community building; they are terrible at dealing with other developers.

It’s no surprise that nearly all the new languages that become fashionable originate with language creators who work for a company that happens to feel a need for a new language. Examples include:

  • Go created by Google for internal use, and attracted an outside fan base. Company languages are not new, with IBM’s PL/1 being the poster child (or is there a more modern poster child). At the moment Go is a trendy language, and this feeds a supply of young developers willing to invest in learning it. Once the trendiness wears off, Google will start to have problems recruiting developers, the reason: Being labelled as a Go developer limits job prospects when few other companies use the language. Talk to a manager who has tried to recruit developers to work on applications written in Fortran, Pascal and other once-widely used languages (and even wannabe widely used languages, such as Ada),
  • Rust a vanity project from Mozilla, which they have now abandoned. Did Rust become fashionable because it arrived at the right time to become the not-Google language? I await a PhD thesis on the topic of the rise and fall of Rust,
  • Microsoft’s C# ceased being trendy some years ago. These days I don’t have much contact with developers working in the Microsoft ecosystem, so I don’t know anything about the state of the C# job market.

Every now and again a language creator has the social skills needed to start an active community. Zig caught my attention when I read that its creator, Andrew Kelley, had quit his job to work full-time on Zig. Two and a-half years later Zig has its own track at FOSEM’21.

Will Zig become the next fashionable language, as Rust/Go popularity fades? I’m rooting for Zig because of its name, there are relatively few languages whose name starts with Z; the start of the alphabet is over-represented with language names. It would be foolish to root for a language because of a belief that it has magical properties (e.g., powerful, readable, maintainable), but the young are foolish.

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Growth in number of packages for widely used languages

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

These days a language’s ecosystem of add-ons, such as packages, is often more important than the features provided by the language (which usually only vary in their syntactic sugar, and built-in support for some subset of commonly occurring features).

Use of a particular language grows and shrinks, sometimes over very many decades. Estimating the number of users of a language is difficult, but a possible proxy is ecosystem activity in the form of package growth/decline. However, it will take many several decades for the data needed to test how effective this proxy might be.

Where are we today?

The Module Counts website is the home for a project that counts the number of libraries/packages/modules contained in 26 language specific repositories. Daily data, in some cases going back to 2010, is available as a csv :-) The following are the most interesting items I discovered during a fishing expedition.

The csv file contains totals, and some values are missing (which means specifying an ‘ignore missing values’ argument to some functions). Some repos have been experiencing large average daily growth (e.g., 65 for PyPI, and 112 for Maven Central-Java), while others are more subdued (e.g., 0.7 for PERL and 3.9 for R’s CRAN). Apart from a few days, the daily change is positive.

Is the difference in the order of magnitude growth due to number of active users, number of packages that currently exist, a wide/narrow application domain (Python is wide, while R’s is narrow), the ease of getting a package accepted, or something else?

The plots below show how PyPI has been experiencing exponential growth of a kind (the regression model fitted to the daily total has the form e^{1.01days+days^2}, where days is the number of days since 2010-01-01; the red line is the daily diff of this equation), while Ruby has been experiencing a linear decline since late 2014 (all code+data):

Daily change in the number of packages in PyPI and Rubygems.

Will the five-year decline in new submissions to Rubygems continue, and does this point to an eventual demise of Ruby (a few decades from now)? Rubygems has years to go before it reaches PERL’s low growth rate (I think PERL is in terminal decline).

Are there any short term patterns, say at the weekly level? Autocorrelation is a technique for estimating the extent to which today’s value is affected by values from the immediate past (usually one or two measurement periods back, i.e., yesterday or the day before that). The two plots below show the autocorrelation for daily changes, with lag in days:

Autocorrelation of daily changes in PyPI and Maven-Java package counts.

The recurring 7-day ‘peaks’ show the impact of weekends (I assume). Is the larger ”weekend-effect’ for Java, compared to PyPI, due to Java usage including a greater percentage of commercial developers (who tend not to work at the weekend)?

I did not manage to find any seasonal effect, e.g., more submissions during the winter than the summer. But I only checked a few of the languages, and only for a single peak (see code for details).

Another way of tracking package evolution is version numbering. For instance, how often do version numbers change, and which component, e.g., major/minor. There have been a couple of studies looking at particular repos over a few years, but nobody is yet recording broad coverage daily, over the long term 😉

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Payback time-frame for research in software engineering

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

What are the major questions in software engineering that researchers should be trying to answer?

A high level question whose answer is likely to involve life, the universe, and everything is: What is the most cost-effective way to build software systems?

Viewing software engineering research as an attempt to find the answer to a big question mirrors physicists quest for a Grand Unified Theory of how the Universe works.

Physicists have the luxury of studying the Universe at their own convenience, the Universe does not need their input to do a better job.

Software engineering is not like physics. Once a software system has been built, the resources have been invested, and there is no reason to recreate it using a more cost-effective approach (the zero cost of software duplication means that manufacturing cost is the cost of the first version).

Designing and researching new ways of building software systems may be great fun, but the time and money needed to run the realistic experiments needed to evaluate their effectiveness is such that they are unlikely to be run. Searching for more cost-effective software development techniques by paying to run the realistic experiments needed to evaluate them, and waiting for the results to become available, is going to be expensive and time-consuming. A theory is proposed, experiments are run, results are analysed; rinse and repeat until a good-enough cost-effective technique is found. One iteration will take many years, and this iterative process is likely to take many decades.

Very many software systems are being built and maintained, and each of these is an experiment. Data from these ‘experiments’ provides a cost-effective approach to improving existing software engineering practices by studying the existing practices to figure out how they work (or don’t work).

Given the volume of ongoing software development, most of the payback from any research investment is likely to occur in the near future, not decades from now; the evidence shows that source code has a short and lonely existence. Investing for a payback that might occur 30-years from now makes no sense; researchers I talk to often use this time-frame when I ask them about the benefits of their research, i.e., just before they are about to retire. Investing in software engineering research only makes economic sense when it is focused on questions that are expected to start providing payback in, say, 3-5 years.

Who is going to base their research on existing industry practices?

Researching existing practices often involves dealing with people issues, and many researchers in computing departments are not that interested in the people side of software engineering, or rather they are more interested in the computer side.

Algorithm oriented is how I would describe researchers who claim to be studying software engineering. I am frequently told about the potential for huge benefits from the discovery of more efficient algorithms. For many applications, algorithms are now commodities, i.e., they are good enough. Those with a career commitment to studying algorithms have a blinkered view of the likely benefits of their work (most of those I have seen are doing studying incremental improvements, and are very unlikely to make a major break through).

The number of researchers studying what professional developers do, with an aim to improving it, is very small (I am excluding the growing number of fake researchers doing surveys). While I hope there will be a significant growth in numbers, I’m not holding my breadth (at least in the short term; as for the long term, Planck’s experience with quantum mechanics was: “Science advances one funeral at a time”).

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Software effort estimation is mostly fake research

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the wilds of industry), which has stopped them acquiring the estimation data needed to build realistic models. A few intrepid people have risked an assault on their ego and talked to people in industry, the outcome has been, until very recently, a small collection of tiny estimation datasets.

In a research context the term effort estimation is actually a hang over from the 1970s; effort correction more accurately describes the behavior of most models since the 1990s. In the 1970s models took various quantities (e.g., estimated lines of code) and calculated an effort estimate. Later models have included an estimate as input to the model, producing a corrected estimate as output. For the sake of appearances I will use existing terminology.

Which effort estimation datasets do researchers tend to use?

A 2012 review of datasets used for effort estimation using machine learning between 1991-2010, found that the top three were: Desharnias with 24 papers (29%), COCOMO with 19 papers (23%) and ISBSG with 17. A 2019 review of datasets used for effort estimation using machine learning between 1991 and 2017, found the top three to be NASA with 17 papers (23%), the COCOMO data and ISBSG were joint second with 16 papers (21%), and Desharnais was third with 14. The 2012 review included more sources in its search than the 2019 review, and subjectively your author has noticed a greater use of the NASA dataset over the last five years or so.

How large are these datasets that have attracted so many research papers?

The NASA dataset contains 93 rows (that is not a typo, there is no power-of-ten missing), COCOMO 63 rows, Desharnais 81 rows, and ISBSG is licensed by the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (academics can apply for a limited time use for research purposes, i.e., not pay the $3,000 annual subscription). The China dataset contains 499 rows, and is sometimes used (there is no mention of a supercomputer being required for this amount of data ;-).

Why are researchers involved in software effort estimation feeding tiny datasets from the 1990s into machine learning algorithms?

Grant money. Research projects are more likely to be funded if they use a trendy technique, and for the last decade machine learning has been the trendiest technique in software engineering research. What data is available to learn from? Those estimation datasets that were flogged to death in the 1990s using non-machine learning techniques, e.g., regression.

Use of machine learning also has the advantage of not needing to know anything about the details of estimating software effort. Everything can be reduced to a discussion of the machine learning algorithms, with performance judged by a chosen error metric. Nobody actually looks at the predicted estimates to discover that the models are essentially producing the same answer, e.g., one learner predicts 43 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 6 hours, 47 minutes and 11 seconds, while a ‘better’ fitting one predicts 43 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, 6 hours, 27 minutes and 51 seconds.

How many ways are there to do machine learning on datasets containing less than 100 rows?

A paper from 2012 evaluated the possibilities using 9-learners times 10 data-prerocessing options (e.g., log transform or discretization) times 7-error estimation metrics giving 630 possible final models; they picked the top 10 performers.

This 2012 study has not stopped researchers continuing to twiddle away on the option’s nobs available to them; anything to keep the paper mills running.

To quote the authors of one review paper: “Unfortunately, we found that very few papers (including most of our own) paid any attention at all to properties of the data set.”

Agile techniques are widely used these days, and datasets from the 1990s are not applicable. What datasets do researchers use to build Agile effort estimation models?

A 2020 review of Agile development effort estimation found 73 papers. The most popular data set, containing 21 rows, was used by nine papers. Three papers used simulated data! At least some authors were going out and finding data, even if it contains fewer rows than the NASA dataset.

As researchers in business schools have shown, large datasets can be obtained from industry; ISBSG actively solicits data from industry and now has data on 9,500+ projects (as far as I can tell a small amount for each project, but that is still a lot of projects).

Are there any estimates on Github? Some Open source projects use JIRA, which includes support for making estimates. Some story point estimates can be found on Github, but the actuals are missing.

A handful of researchers have obtained and released estimation datasets containing thousands of rows, e.g., the SiP dataset contains 10,100 rows and the CESAW dataset contains over 40,000 rows. These datasets are generally ignored, perhaps because when presented with lots of real data researchers have no idea what to do with it.

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My new kitchen clock

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

After several decades of keeping up with the time, since November my kitchen clock has only been showing the correct time every 12-hours. Before I got to buy a new one, I was asked what I wanted to Christmas, and there was money to spend :-)

Guess what Santa left for me:

Hermle Ravensburg clock.

The Hermle Ravensburg is a mechanical clock, driven by the pull of gravity on a cylindrical 1kg of Iron (I assume).

Setup requires installing the energy source (i.e., hang the cylinder on one end of a chain), attach clock to a wall where there is enough distance for the cylinder to slowly ‘fall’, set the time, add energy (i.e., pull the chain so the cylinder is at maximum height), and set the pendulum swinging.

The chain is long enough for eight days of running. However, for the clock to be visible from outside my kitchen I had to place it over a shelf, and running time is limited to 2.5 days before energy has to be added.

The swinging pendulum provides the reference beat for the running of the clock. The cycle time of a pendulum swing is proportional to the square root of the distance of the center of mass from the pivot point. There is an adjustment ring for fine-tuning the swing time (just visible below the circular gold disc of the pendulum).

I used my knowledge of physics to wind the center of mass closer to the pivot to reduce the swing time slightly, overlooking the fact that the thread on the adjustment ring moved a smaller bar running through its center (which moved in the opposite direction when I screwed the ring towards the pivot). Physics+mechanical knowledge got it right on the next iteration.

I have had the clock running 1-second per hour too slow, and 1-second per hour too fast. Current thinking is that the pendulum is being slowed slightly when the cylinder passes on its slow fall (by increased air resistance). Yes dear reader, I have not been resetting the initial conditions before making a calibration run 😐

What else remains to learn, before summer heat has to be adjusted for?

While the clock face and hands may be great for attracting buyers, it has serious usability issues when it comes to telling the time. It is difficult to tell the time without paying more attention than normal; without being a few feet of the clock it is not possible to tell the time by just glancing at it. The see though nature of the face, the black-on-black of the end of the hour/minute hands, and the extension of the minute hand in the opposite direction all combine to really confuse the viewer.

A wire cutter solved the minute hand extension issue, and yellow fluorescent paint solved the black-on-black issue. Ravensburg clock with improved user interface, framed by faded paint of its predecessor below:

Ravensburg clock with improved user interface.

There is a discrete ting at the end of every hour. This could be slightly louder, and I plan to add some weight to the bell hammer. Had the bell been attached slightly off center, fine volume adjustment would have been possible.