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Evidence-based SE groups doing interesting work, 2021 version

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Who are the research groups currently doing interesting work in evidenced-base software engineering (academics often use the term empirical software engineering)? Interestingness is very subjective, in my case it is based on whether I think the work looks like it might contribute something towards software engineering practices (rather than measuring something to get a paper published or fulfil a requirement for an MSc or PhD). I last addressed this question in 2013, and things have changed a lot since then.

This post focuses on groups (i.e., multiple active researchers), and by “currently doing” I’m looking for multiple papers published per year in the last few years.

As regular readers will know, I think that clueless button pushing (a.k.a. machine learning) in software engineering is mostly fake research. I tend to ignore groups that are heavily clueless button pushing oriented.

Like software development groups, research groups come and go, with a few persisting for many years. People change jobs, move into management, start companies based on their research, new productive people appear, and there is the perennial issue of funding. A year from now, any of the following groups may be disbanded or moved on to other research areas.

Some researchers leave a group to set up their own group (even moving continents), and I know that many people in the 2013 survey have done this (many in the Microsoft group listed in 2013 are now scattered across the country). Most academic research is done by students studying for a PhD, and the money needed to pay for these students comes from research grants. Some researchers are willing to spend their time applying for grants to build a group (on average, around 40% of a group’s lead researcher’s time is spent applying for grants), while others are happy to operate on a smaller scale.

Evidence-based research has become mainstream in software engineering, but this is not to say that the findings or data have any use outside of getting a paper published. A popular tactic employed by PhD students appears to be to look for what they consider to be an interesting pattern in code appearing on Github, and write a thesis that associated this pattern with an issue thought to be of general interest, e.g., predicting estimates/faults/maintainability/etc. Every now and again, a gold nugget turns up in the stream of fake research.

Data is being made available via personal Github pages, figshare, osf, Zenondo, and project or personal University (generally not a good idea, because the pages often go away when the researcher leaves). There is no current systematic attempt to catalogue the data.

There has been a huge increase in papers coming out of Brazil, and Brazilians working in research groups around the world, since 2013. No major Brazilian name springs to mind, but that may be because I have not noticed that they are Brazilian (every major research group seems to have one, and many of the minor ones as well). I may have failed to list a group because their group page is years out of date, which may be COVID related, bureaucracy, or they are no longer active.

The China list is incomplete. There are Chinese research groups whose group page is hosted on Github, and I have failed to remember that they are based in China. Also, Chinese pages can appear inactive for a year or two, and then suddenly be updated with lots of recent information. I have not attempted to keep track of Chinese research groups.

Organized by country, groups include (when there is no group page available, I have used the principle’s page, and when that is not available I have used a group member page; some groups make no attempt to help others find out about their work):

Belgium (I cite the researchers with links to pdfs)

Brazil (Garcia, Steinmacher)

Canada (Antoniol, Data-driven Analysis of Software Lab, Godfrey and Ptidel, Robillard, SAIL; three were listed in 2013)

China (Lin Chen, Lu Zhang)

Germany (Chair of Software Engineering, CSE working group, Software Engineering for Distributed Systems Group, Research group Zeller)

Greece (listed in 2013)

Israel

Italy (listed in 2013)

Japan (Inoue lab, Kamei Web, Kula, and Kusumoto lab)

Netherlands

Spain (the only member of the group listed in 2013 with a usable web page)

Sweden (Chalmers, KTH {Baudry and Monperrus, with no group page})

Switzerland (SCG and REVEAL; both listed in 2013)

UK

USA (Devanbu, Foster, Maletic, Microsoft, PLUM lab, SEMERU, squaresLab, Weimer; two were listed in 2013)

Sitting here typing away, I have probably missed out some obvious candidates (particularly in the US). Suggestions for omissions welcome (remember, this is about groups, not individuals).

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Business school research in software engineering is some of the best

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

There is a group of software engineering researchers that don’t feature as often as I would like in my evidence-based software engineering book; academics working in business schools.

Business school academics have written some of the best papers I have read on software engineering; the catch is that the data they use is confidential. For somebody writing a book that only discusses a topic if there is data publicly available, this is a problem.

These business school researchers show that it is possible for academics to obtain ‘interesting’ software engineering data from industry. My experience with talking to researchers in computing departments is that most are too involved in their own algorithmic bubble to want to talk to anybody else.

One big difference between the data analysis papers written by academics in computing departments and business schools, is statistical sophistication. Computing papers are still using stone-age pre-computer age techniques, the business papers use a wide range of sophisticated techniques (sometimes cutting edge).

There is one aspect of software engineering papers written by business school researchers that grates with me, many of the authors obviously don’t understand software engineering from a developer’s perspective; well, obviously, they are business oriented people.

The person who has done the largest amount of interesting software engineering research, whose work I don’t (yet; I will find a way) discuss, is Chris Kemerer; a researcher who has a long list of empirical papers going back to the early 1990s, and rarely gets cited by papers by people in computing departments (I am the only person I know, who limits themself to papers where the data is publicly available).