Browsing by Author "Zimmermann, Thomas"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Analytical Release Management for Mobile Apps
    (2018-01-15) Nayebi, Maleknaz; Ruhe, Guenther; Zimmermann, Thomas; Menzies, Tim
    Developing software products and maintaining software versions for adding or modifying functionality and quality to software is affected by several factors that have been traditionally analyzed under the terms “when to release” and “what to release”. Along the emergence of mobile apps, the release practices are changing. App stores are markets for many small sized software products which provide an open platform for users to express their opinions about using apps. The rise in popularity of mobile devices has led to a parallel growth in the size of the app store market, intriguing several research studies and commercial platforms on mining app stores. Large numbers of similar software products in a market make app design highly competitive. On the other side, app store reviews are currently the primary tool being used to analyze different aspects of app development and evolution. However, app users' feedback does not only occur on the app store. In fact, despite the mass quantity of posts that are made daily on social media, the importance and value that these discussions provide remain largely unused. While release management of software products has been long the subject of studies, mobile apps bring new opportunities and threats to the release practices. This thesis is a series of eight papers contributing to: - Understanding the opportunities and threats for release management of mobile apps. - Analyzing evolution of mobile apps over different releases. - Providing new formulation to integrate the opportunities of app stores into planning models. - Providing decision support for release management of mobile applications.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Appendix to Information Needs in Bug Reports: Improving Cooperation Between Developers and Users
    (2009-09-25T15:03:56Z) Breu, Silvia; Premraj, Rahul; Sillito, Jonathan; Zimmermann, Thomas
    This technical report contains all data that is needed to replicate the paper “Information Needs in Bug Reports: Improving Cooperation Between Developers and Users” to be published at CSCW 2010 in Savannah, Georgia, USA. The accompanying zip file contains bug reports, cards with categorization, and R scripts that were used in the study.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Evaluating Usage Expertise Mined from Version Archives
    (2012-10-04) Ma, David; Sillito, Jonathan; Zimmermann, Thomas
    One approach for modelling coding expertise is to quantify the knowledge accrued from the use of library functionality. This concept is known as Usage Expertise (Schuler and Zimmermann 2008). This thesis makes three contributions. The first is a formal specification of a system which mines Usage Expertise from a version control repository in order to recommend developers for a change task. The second contribution is a comparison of the accuracy of the system measured against the oft-used Line 10 model of developer expertise. This evaluation finds that the usage model yields simultaneous gains in the accuracy and the diversity of recommendations. The third and final contribution is a qualitative study that explores the trust and behavioural tendencies of 9 software developers who were given the model reified as a software tool. The study finds Usage Expertise to be a trustworthy identifier of expertise. However, the study also finds a series of social and organizational factors that limit the efficacy of the model in real world contexts.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Expert Recommendation with Usage Expertise
    (2009-07-09T17:28:15Z) Ma, David; Schuler, David; Zimmermann, Thomas; Sillito, Jonathan
    Global and distributed software development increases the need to find and connect developers with relevant expertise. Existing recommendation systems typically model expertise based on file changes (implementation expertise). While these approaches have shown success, they require a substantial recorded history of development for a project. Previously, we have proposed the concept of usage expertise, i.e., expertise manifested through the act of calling (using) a method. In this paper, we assess the viability of this concept by evaluating expert recommendations for the ASPECTJ and ECLIPSE projects. We find that both usage and implementation expertise have comparable levels of accuracy, which suggests that usage expertise may be used as a substitute measure. We also find a notable overlap of method calls across both projects, which suggests that usage expertise can be leveraged to recommend experts from different projects and thus for projects with little or no history.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Frequently Asked Questions in Bug Reports
    (2009-03-23T16:05:29Z) Breu, Silvia; Premraj, Rahul; Sillito, Jonathan; Zimmermann, Thomas
    Bug tracking systems play a central role in software development since they allow users and developers to submit and discuss bugs and new features. To better understand information and communication needs in bug tracking, we analysed what questions are asked in bug reports. We sampled 600 bug reports from the MOZILLA and ECLIPSE projects and located 947 questions in the reports. Next, we used an open card sort and identified eight categories of questions, which can further be broken down into forty groups. We show the value of this catalogue of frequently asked questions with a large quantitative and qualitative study on when questions are asked and how they are answered. A consequence of our results is that constant user involvement is crucial for successful bug reports and that better tools are needed to support this.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Information needs in bug reports: improving cooperation between developers and users
    (ACM, 2010) Breu, Silvia; Premraj, Rahul; Sillito, Jonathan; Zimmermann, Thomas
    For many software projects, bug tracking systems play a central role in supporting collaboration between the developers and the users of the software. To better understand this collaboration and how tool support can be improved, we have quantitatively and qualitatively analysed the questions asked in a sample of 600 bug reports from the MOZILLA and ECLIPSE projects. We categorised the questions and analysed response rates and times by category and project. Our results show that the role of users goes beyond simply reporting bugs: their active and ongoing participation is important for making progress on the bugs they report. Based on the results, we suggest four ways in which bug tracking systems can be improved.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Security Trend Analysis with CVE Topic Models
    (2010-08-13T16:35:56Z) Neuhaus, Stephan; Zimmermann, Thomas
    We study the vulnerability reports in the Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) database by using topic models on their description texts to find prevalent vulnerability types and new trends semi-automatically. In our study of the 39,393 unique CVEs until the end of 2009, we identify the following trends, given here in the form of a weather forecast: PHP: declining, with occasional SQL injection. Buffer Overflows: flattening out after decline. Format Strings: in steep decline. SQL Injection and XSS: remaining strong, and rising. Cross-Site Request Forgery: a sleeping giant perhaps, stirring. Application Servers: rising steeply.