Abstract:
Software engineering is an data rich activity: changes to source code are recorded in version archives, bugs are reported to issue tracking systems, and communications are archived in e-mails and newsgroups. The Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESM) group at Microsoft Research analyzes such data to better understand various software development issues from an empirical perspective. In this talk, I will highlight our research themes and activities using examples from our research on socio technical congruence, bug reporting and triaging, and data-driven software engineering. I will highlight our unique ability to leverage industrial data and developers and the ability to make near term impact on Microsoft via the results of our studies. The work presented in this talk has been done by Chris Bird, Brendan Murphy, Nachi Nagappan, myself, and many others who have visited our group over the past years.

Bio:
Thomas Zimmermann received the Diploma degree in computer science from the University of Passau, and the PhD degree from Saarland University, Germany. He is a researcher in the Software Reliability Research Group at Microsoft Research, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on systematic mining of version archives and bug databases to conduct empirical studies and to build tools to support developers and managers. He received two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards for his work at ICSE '07 and FSE '08. He co-organized an ICSM working session on Myths in Software Engineering (MythSE '07), the DEFECTS '08 and '09, and RSSE '08 and '10 workshops. He served on a variety of program committees, including ICSE, MSR, PROMISE, ICSM, and the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys). He is PC co-chair for MSR '10 and '11. His research interests include empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, software reliability, development tools, and social networking. http://thomas-zimmermann.com