Archive for January, 2010

I Don’t Care Until I Can Check

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Over in the Agile Usability group, Larry Constantine writes: ...Capers Jones has been sharing with me some hard data summaries on a variety of development methods and practices gathered from a very large number of projects undertaken by varied organizations that contribute data on bugs, costs, etc., to his company....An interesting ...

Cameron Neylon Says Nice Things

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Cameron Neylon has some nice things to say about the Software Carpentry course; here's hoping at least one of his readers likes it enough to help fund the next round.

About Time

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor who started the whole "vaccines cause autism" scare, is finally being held accountable for his dishonest and deliberately misleading conduct. If a big pharma company had done the things he did, they'd be excoriated by the press and sued for hundreds of millions of dollars; ...

A Student-Run DemoCamp at U of T

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Via Reginald Tan and others, news of a student-oriented DemoCamp event at the University of Toronto. Hope to see lots of students demoing; hope to see lots of people from industry there asking questions and passing out business cards :-)

CUSEC 2010

Monday, January 25th, 2010

If it's Monday, I must be catching up... I spoke at CUSEC 2010 last week to about 250 students and others about evidence-based software engineering. The talk is an update of the one I gave at DevDays last October; it's basically a pitch for an upcoming O'Reilly collection on the ...

Brazilian Government’s Experience with Open Source

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

The opening isn't promising---"more than 60 countries and international organizations have developed nearly 275 policy documents related with the use of Open Source in public sector"---but the presentation itself is worth a look. Later: and then there's The Guardian's worldwide index of open government data sets.

CUSEC

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

My talk at CUSEC starts in 15 minutes; to calm my nerves, I'm catching up on my blog :-). Here are where students are from: Carleton 30 Concordia 66 École de Technologie Supérieure 16 École Polytechnique de Montréal 4 McGill 27 McMaster 29 Ryerson 1 Schulich 1 Sherbrooke 6 Université de Montréal 2 Université Laval 8 Ottawa 21 Toronto 12 UTM 2 UTSC 6 Waterloo 21 Windsor 1

More on Mining

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Several people have recently linked to Diederik van Liere's talk "Learning from 10 yrs of Bugzilla data". If you're interested in that kind of thing, there's a whole sub-field in software engineering devoted to mining information about actual development practices from various sources. The best two places to start are: Kagdi, Collard, ...

Two More Thumbs Up

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

I blogged last week about Sahoo et al's paper on automated bug diagnosis and Gutiart et al's survey of performance management techniques for web apps. This week has brought two more good ones to my desk: Artzi, Dolby, Tip, and Pistoia: "Practical Fault Localization for Dynamic Web Applications". The authors have ...

We Can Only Interview the Survivors

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Harvard Business Review reports work done by Prof. Rebecca Henderson at MIT showing that most successful companies are actually just lucky. Keep it in mind the next time an interweb guru tries to sell you a book...