It Will Never Work in Theory
2021-09-11: Common Bug-Fix Patterns: A Large-Scale Observational Study Keywords: Faults Reviewed by: Greg Wilson
We know a lot more about the mistakes programmers make and how often they make them than most programmers realize. Campos2017 is an example: its authors analyzed a dataset containing over 4 million bug-fix commits from over 100,000 Java projects and checked their findings against a qualitative analysis of manually curated bugs in a smaller dataset. Using the taxonomy developed in Pan2008, Campos2017 found that the five most common fixes were: fixing the conditional in an if (4.2% of fixes); fixing the value(s) passed in a method call (6.3%); fixing the number or type of value(s) passed in a method...
2021-09-10: Why Software Projects need Heroes: Lessons Learned from 1100+ Projects Keywords: Code Ownership, Software Projects Reviewed by: Greg Wilson
Forty-five years ago, Fred Brooks advocated a "chief programmer" model of development similar to the "chief surgeon" model used in most hospitals. It didn't catch on—at least not formally—but as Majumder2019 shows, many projects use it in practice. Their research questions and answers are: How common are hero projects? They define a "hero project" as one in which 5% or fewer of developers are responsible for 95% or more of interactions. They don't just consider commits: looking at both the code interaction graph and the social interaction graph, they find that 80% of the projects they looked at on GitHub...
