The Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement research area activities at Microsoft Research focus on understanding various software development issues from an empirical perspective. We are involved in doing practical studies on large software systems. All our work is done in conjunction with Microsoft product teams such as Windows and Visual Studio.
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
Silvia Breu, Rahul Premraj, Jonathan Sillito, and Thomas Zimmermann, Information Needs in Bug Reports: Improving Cooperation Between Developers and Users, in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., February 2010
Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Harald Gall, Premkumar Devanbu, and Brendan Murphy, Using Socio-Technical Networks to Predict Failures, in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), IEEE, November 2009
Laurie Williams, Gunnar Kudrjavets, and Nachiappan Nagappan, On the Effectiveness of Unit Test Automation at Microsoft, in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), IEEE, November 2009
Md. Mainur Rahman, Guenther Ruhe, and Thomas Zimmermann, Optimized Assignment of Developers for Fixing Bugs – An Initial Evaluation for Eclipse Projects (Short Paper), in Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), IEEE Computer Society, October 2009
Audris Mockus, Nachiappan Nagappan, and Trung T. Dinh-Trong, Test Coverage and Post-Verification Defects: A Multiple Case Study, in Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement Conference (ESEM), IEEE Computer Society, October 2009
Thomas Zimmermann and Nachiappan Nagappan, Predicting Defects with Program Dependencies (Short Paper), in Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), IEEE Computer Society, October 2009
David Ma, David Schuler, Thomas Zimmermann, and Jonathan Sillito, Expert Recommendation with Usage Expertise (Short Paper), in Proceedings of the 25th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), IEEE Computer Society, September 2009
Gaeul Jeong, Sunghun Kim, and Thomas Zimmermann, Improving Bug Triage with Bug Tossing Graphs, in Proceedings of the 7th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/ FSE), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., August 2009
Thomas Zimmermann, Nachiappan Nagappan, Harald Gall, Emanuel Giger, and Brendan Murphy, Cross-project Defect Prediction, in Proceedings of the 7th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/ FSE), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., August 2009
Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Premkumar Devanbu, Harald Gall, and Brendan Murphy, Does distributed development affect software quality? An empirical case study of Windows Vista, in Communications of the ACM, vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 85–93, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., New York, NY, USA, August 2009
DEFECTS '09: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Defects in Large Software Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., New York, NY, USA, July 2009
Stephan Neuhaus and Thomas Zimmermann, The Beauty and the Beast: Vulnerabilities in Red Hat's Packages, in Proceedings of the 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC), USENIX, June 2009
Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Premkumar Devanbu, Harald Gall, and Brendan Murphy, Does distributed development affect software quality? An empirical case study of Windows Vista, in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, May 2009
Andrew Begel, Nachiappan Nagappan, Christopher Poile, and Lucas Layman, Coordination in large-scale software teams, in Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects on Software Engineering (CHASE), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, May 2009
Constantin Sârbu, Nachiappan Nagappan, and Neeraj Suri, On Equivalence Partitioning of Code Paths inside OS Kernel Components, in Proceedings of the 2009 Software Technologies for Future Dependable Distributed Systems (STFSSD), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, March 2009
Upcoming events
ICSE 2010 NIER Track – New and Emerging Results, Cape Town, South Africa. Submit by 7 January, 2010
MSR 2010 - Mining Software Repositories, Cape Town, South Africa. Submit by 11/14 January, 2010 (abstracts/papers)
ESEM 2010 – Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Bolzano, Italy.
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. For more information about becoming an intern, please visit our internship website. When you apply, select "Software Reliability Research" as area of interest and add "ESM group" as MS contact. After applying via the internship site please do send us a note to let us know to watch out for your application.
Visitors
Professors
Harald Gall (2008, 2009)
Victor R. Basili (2007)
Neeraj Suri (2007)
Laurie Williams (2009)
Andreas Zeller (2005, 2009)
Post-docs
Martin Pinzger (2007)
Interns
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)
Software Reliability Research (SRR)
Rigorous Software Engineering (RSE)
Foundations in Software Engineering (FSE)
