Prof. Michael W. Godfrey, Software Analytics Group (SWAG), University of Waterloo, Canada
Empirical research in software engineering, as in the natural sciences, involves building models of the problem domain — in our case, software and its development — and then evaluating those models against real-world evidence. There is often pressure on researchers to “think big” to discover actionable truths that pertain broadly to software development. In this talk, I discuss the value of doing empirical “deep dives” into the study of individual software systems to better understand their social and technical contexts. Using example studies to illustrate, I argue that time spent better understanding individual systems can lead to deeper insights about the problem space and improve awareness of the holes, ambiguities, and naive mistakes in our models.
Biography
Michael W. Godfrey is a Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (UW), which he joined in 1998. He is co-founder of the Software Analytics Group (SWAG), and is a Senior Member of both the ACM and IEEE. He has held an NSERC Industrial Research Associate Chair in telecommunications software engineering (2000-2005), and a UW David R. Cheriton Faculty Fellowship (2014-17). He has won three “best paper” awards, and one “most influential paper award” at various conferences. His research interests span many areas of empirical software engineering including software evolution, code review, reverse engineering, program comprehension, mining software repositories, and software clone detection and analysis. He has also contributed chapters to several books, including “Copy-Paste as a Principled Engineering Tool” (“Making Software: What Really Works and Why We Believe It” O’Reilly, 2010) “Why Provenance Matters” (“Perspectives on Data Science for Software Engineering”, Morgan-Kaufmann, 2016), and “Sometimes, cloning is a sound design decision!”, (“Code Clone Analysis: Researches, Tools, and Practices, Springer, 2021).