Tommaso Dal Sasso

A holistic immersive ambient for software evolution, integrating the data around a project into a visual environment for analysis and intelligent recommendations.

Software development involves iterations of writing, running, testing, and debugging code. When fixing a defect, developers construct a mental model of the system that explains the defect and eventually identifies its cause. However, filtering complete, coherent, and reliable information from a running system is not an easy task: Using a simple approach, like generic logging, is often ineffective because it deconstructs and flattens the state into textual data, thus requiring ad-hoc understanding and processing. On the other hand, collecting structured information in form of objects to observe and understand a precise property of the system requires specialized ad-hoc code, decoupled from the system's domain, and usually not reusable. We present ShoreLine, a domain-specific data collection framework that enables the developers to extract selected information about a running system. The developer is able to take a snapshot of all the information deemed relevant about a piece of code by writing few lines of code, thus enabling structured and effective logging and reporting of errors. We detail our framework in the context of a bug reporting platform, and illustrate how such an approach can be used to create in-depth and reliable domain-specific bug reports.

Software development, like any prolonged and intellectually demanding activity, can negatively affect the motivation of developers. This is especially true in specific areas of software engineering, such as requirements engineering, test-driven development, bug reporting and fixing, where the creative aspects of programming fall short. The developers' engagement might progressively degrade, potentially impacting their work's quality. Gamification, the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts, is hailed as a means to boost the motivation of people for a wide range of rote activities. Indeed, well-designed games deeply involve gamers in a positive loop of production, feedback, and reward, eliciting desirable feelings like happiness and collaboration. The question we investigate is how the seemingly frivolous context of games and gamification can be ported to the technically challenging and sober domain of software engineering. Our investigation starts with a review of the state of the art of gamification, supported by a motivating scenario to expose how gamification elements can be integrated in software engineering. We provide a set of basic building blocks to apply gamification techniques, present a conceptual framework to do so, illustrated in two usage contexts, and critically discuss our findings.

To ensure quality of software systems, developers use bug reports to track defects. It is in the interest of users and developers that bug reports provide the necessary information to ease the fixing process. Past research found that users do not provide the information that developers deem ideally useful to fix a bug. This raises an interesting question: What is the satisficing information to speed up the bug fixing process? We conducted an observational study on the relation between provided report information and its lifetime, considering more than 650,000 reports from open-source systems using popular bug trackers. We distilled a meta-model for a minimal bug report, establishing a basic layer of core features. We found that few fields influence the resolution time and that customized fields have little impact on it. We performed a survey to investigate what users deem easy to provide in a bug report.

While constructing and evolving software systems, developers generate directly and indirectly a large amount of data of diverse nature, such as source code changes, bug tracking information, IDE interactions, stack traces, etc. Often these diverse data sources are processed and visualized in isolation, leading to a partial view of systems. We present a blended approach to visualize several data \"ingredients" at once, to give as complete an answer as possible to the question "What happened to the system in the last few days?". The goal is to enable a quick and comprehensive assessment of what happened to a software system in any given time frame.

During software development, exceptions are by no means exceptional: Programmers repeatedly try and test their code to ensure that it works as expected. While doing so, runtime exceptions are raised, pointing out various issues, such as inappropriate usage of an API, convoluted code, as well as defects. Such failures result in stack traces, lists composed of the sequence of method invocations that led to the interruption of the program. Stack traces are useful to debug source code, and if shared also enhance the quality of bug reports. However, they are handled manually and individually, while we argue that they can be leveraged automatically and collectively to enable what we call crowdstacking, the automated collection of stack traces on the scale of a whole development community. We present our crowdstacking approach, supported by Shore-Line Reporter, a tool which seamlessly collects stack traces during program development and execution and stores them on a central repository. We illustrate how thousands of stack traces stemming from the IDEs of several developers can be leveraged to identify common hot spots in the code that are involved in failures, using this knowledge to retrieve relevant and related bug reports and to provide an effective, instant context of the problem to the developer.