The Empirical Software Engineering working group empowers software development teams to make sound data-driven decisions by deploying novel analytic tools and methods based on ESE’s empirical research on products, process, people, and customers.
Our current interests are in the areas of:
- Software Reliability: Predicting Failures/Failure-proneness, Test Prioritization, Failure Analysis.
- Software Process: Organizational Impact on Quality, Agile Software Development, Global Software Development, Effort Estimation
- Empirical Studies: Unit Testing, Inspections, Assertions, Test Driven Development
- Games Research: Impact of Social Play, Retention of Players, Usage of Game Features
The ESE group is part of Research in Software Engineering (RiSE). For an overview of our research activities, we recommend the showcase paper "Empirical Software Engineering at Microsoft Research".
Thomas Zimmermann and Christian Bird, Collaborative Software Development in Ten Years: Diversity, Tools, and Remix Culture, in Proceedings of the CSCW Workshop on the Future of Collaborative Software Development (FutureCSD 2012), ACM, February 2012
Miryung Kim, Thomas Zimmermann, and Nachiappan Nagappan, Appendix to A Field Study of Refactoring Rationale, Benefits, and Challenges at Microsoft, no. MSR-TR-2012-4, 11 January 2012
Ashish Gupta, Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Thirumalesh Bhat, and Syed Emran, Detecting Energy Patterns in Software Development, no. MSR-TR-2011-106, 16 November 2011
Tim Menzies, Andrew Butcher, Andrian Marcus, and Thomas Zimmermann, Local vs Global Models for Effort Estimation and Defect Prediction, in Proceedings of the 26st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), IEEE, November 2011
Andreas Zeller, Thomas Zimmermann, and Christian Bird, Failure is a Four-Letter Word: A Parody in Empirical Research, in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering, ACM, September 2011
Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, brendan murphy, Harald Gall, and Premkumar Devanbu, Don't Touch My Code! Examining the Effects of Ownership on Software Quality, in Proceedings of the the eighth joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on The Foundations of Software Engineering, ACM, September 2011
Qiaona Hong, Sunghun Kim, S. C. Cheung, and Christian Bird, Understanding a Developer Social Network and its Evolution, in Proceedings of the 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, IEEE, September 2011
Ayse Tosun Misirli, Brendan Murphy, Thomas Zimmermann, and Ayse Basar, An Explanatory Analysis on Eclipse Beta-Release Bugs Through In-Process Metrics, in Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Software Quality (WoSQ 2011), ACM, September 2011
Christian Bird, Sociotechnical Coordination and Collaboration in Open Source Software, in Proceedings of the 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, IEEE, September 2011
Alexander Tarvo, Thomas Zimmermann, and Jacek Czerwonka, An Integration Resolution Algorithm for Mining Multiple Branches in Version Control Systems (Industry Track), in Proceedings of the 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2011), IEEE, September 2011
Sunghun Kim, Thomas Zimmermann, and Nachiappan Nagappan, Crash Graphs: An Aggregated View of Multiple Crashes to Improve Crash Triage (Practical Experience Report), in Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2011), IEEE, July 2011
Chris Parnin, Christian Bird, and Emerson Murphy-Hill, Java Generics Adoption: How New Features are Introduced, Championed, or Ignored, in Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, ACM, 27 May 2011
Benjamin Livshits and Thomas Zimmermann, DynaMine: Finding Usage Patterns and Their Violations by Mining Software Repositories, in Mining Software Specifications: Methodologies and Applications, CRC Press, May 2011
Kenneth Hullett, Nachiappan Nagappan, Eric Schuh, and John Hopson, Data Analytics for Game Development (NIER Track), in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering, ACM, May 2011
Jacek Czerwonka, Rajiv Das, Nachiappan Nagappan, Alex Tarvo, and Alex Teterev, CRANE: Failure Prediction, Change Analysis and Test Prioritization in Practice - Experiences from Windows, in International Conference on Software Testing (ICST) 2011, IEEE, 30 March 2011
People
MSR Redmond:
Tom Ball
Mike Barnett
Christian Bird
Jacek Czerwonka
Kathryn McKinley
Nachi Nagappan (Contact)
Wolfram Schulte
Thomas Zimmermann
MSR Cambridge:
Brendan Murphy
MSR Bangalore:
Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath
Internships
We are always looking for exceptional PhD candidates to join us as interns, any time of the year, though summer is the typical time interns visit. We have the possibility of students spending an internship either in Cambridge, UK or Redmond, USA. To apply for an internship in the ESE group, please send an email with your CV to ese-internships@microsoft.com.
Upcoming events
SEIF Awards - Submit your proposals by 6 January, 2012.
Visitors
Professors
Miryung Kim (2011)
Tim Menzies (2011)
Abram Hindle (2011)
Sung Kim (2010)
Harald Gall (2008, 2009)
Laurie Williams (2009)
Andreas Zeller (2005, 2009)
Victor R. Basili (2007)
Neeraj Suri (2007)
Post-docs
Martin Pinzger (2007)
Interns
Ashish Gupta (2011)
Sauvik Das (2011)
Kıvanç Muşlu (2011)
Juan Francisco Rodríguez (2011)
Francisco Servant (2011)
Emad Shihab (2011)
Ray Buse (2010)
Ken Hullett (2010)
Mei Nagappan (2010)
Kalaikumaran Ramamurthy (2010)
Christian Bird (2008, 2009)
Philip Guo (2009)
Ayse Tosun (2009)
Andreas Johansson (2007)
Lucas Layman (2007)
Thomas Zimmermann (2006)
Related Groups
Human Interaction in Programming (HIP)
Rigorous Software Engineering (RSE)
