December 2012

2012 – a year of learning technology failures

Reading Time: 4 minutes

It’s that time of year when all the movers and shakers attempt to predict what will be big in 2013. Well there are no such predictions here. However, they do say you can predict the future by learning lessons from the past, so I’m going look back over the past year instead and ask: what was crap about 2012? (I should reiterate that these views are, of course, entirely my own…)

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How open source development processes impact software quality

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This article is part of a series of blog posts reviewing academic studies into open source software quality.

Exploring the Effects of Process Characteristics on Product Quality in Open Source Software Development, Koch and Neumann, 2008

Koch and Neumann from Vienna University published this paper in 2008. It built on prior published research into open source development processes and was a landmark study in terms of scale, extracting metrics from over 2 million lines of code. Prior published research in this area analysed data from code repositories and bug trackers, however Koch and Neumann were concerned that the resulting metrics focused too much on product rather than process. Their study would review both product AND process, with the particular aim of  assessing the impact of software processes on product quality.

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