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
For an overview of our research activities, we recommend the showcase paper "Empirical Software Engineering at Microsoft Research".
Peter C. Rigby and Christian Bird, Convergent Software Peer Review Practices, in Proceedings of the the joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on The Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), ACM, August 2013
Meiyappan Nagappan, Thomas Zimmermann, and Christian Bird, Diversity in Software Engineering Research, in Proceedings of the 9th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2013), ACM, August 2013
Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath and Jithin Thomas, Structural and Temporal Patterns-Based Features, in Proceedings of International Workshop on Data Analysis Patterns in Software Engineering (DAPSE) 2013, ACM, 21 May 2013
Emerson Murphy-Hill, Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Bird, and Nachiappan Nagappan, The Design of Bug Fixes, in Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013), IEEE, May 2013
Alberto Bacchelli and Christian Bird, Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges of Modern Code Review, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE, May 2013
Jeff Huang, Thomas Zimmermann, Nachiappan Nagappan, Charles Harrison, and Bruce Phillips, Mastering the Art of War: How Patterns of Gameplay Influence Skill in Halo, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013), ACM, April 2013
Sunghun Kim, Thomas Zimmermann, Rahul Premraj, Nicolas Bettenburg, and Shivkumar Shivaji, Predicting Method Crashes with Bytecode Operations, in Proceedings of the 6th Annual India Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2013), ACM, February 2013
Kenneth Hullett, Nachi Nagappan, Eric Schuh, and John Hopson, Empirical analysis of user data in game software development, in Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement , ACM, 1 November 2012
Christian Bird and Thomas Zimmermann, Assessing the Value of Branches with What-if Analysis, in Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2012), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2012
Miryung Kim, Thomas Zimmermann, and Nachiappan Nagappan, A Field Study of Refactoring Challenges and Benefits, in Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2012), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2012
Kenneth Hullett, Nachiappan Nagappan, Eric Schuh, and John Hopson, Empirical Analysis of User Data in Game Software Development, in Proceedings of Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ACM, 25 September 2012
Abram Hindle, Christian Bird, Thomas Zimmermann, and Nachiappan Nagappan, Relating Requirements to Implementation via Topic Analysis, in Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2012), IEEE, 25 September 2012
Emad Shihab, Christian Bird, and Thomas Zimmermann, The Effect of Branching Strategies on Software Quality, in Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 19 September 2012
Sunghun Kim, Thomas Zimmermann, Rahul Premraj, Nicolas Bettenburg, and Shivkumar Shivaji, Predicting Method Crashes with Bytecode Operations, no. MSR-TR-2012-94, 10 September 2012
Meiyappan Nagappan, Thomas Zimmermann, and Christian Bird, Representativeness in Software Engineering Research, no. MSR-TR-2012-93, 5 September 2012
People
MSR Redmond/RISE:
Tom Ball
Mike Barnett
Christian Bird
Kathryn McKinley
Nachi Nagappan (contact)
Thomas Zimmermann
MSR Redmond/TSE:
Jacek Czerwonka
Wolfram Schulte
MSR Redmond/VIBE:
Andrew Begel
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 25 January, 2013.
DAPSE 2013: Workshop on Data Analysis Patterns in Software Engineering
RELENG 2013: Workshop on Release Engineering
Submit papers by February 7, 2013.
Visitors
Professors
Emerson Murphy-Hill (2012)
Miryung Kim (2011)
Tim Menzies (2011, 2012)
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
Alberto Bacchelli (2012)
Jeff Huang (2012)
Ekrem Kocagüneli (2012)
Shaun Phillips (2012)
Juliana Saraiva (2012)
Alexander Tarvo (2012)
Sauvik Das (2011)
Ashish Gupta (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)