Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Podcast, Software Reliability

Can the Linux Kernel be More Maintainable? Anandeep interviews Professor Stephen Shach

anandeep — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:15:00 GMT

Prof Stephen R. (Steve) Schach is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the Vanderbilt University.

Port 25 met up with him while he was visiting Seattle, Washington in picturesque Kirkland, Washington on the shores of Lake Washington.

Steve (he hates being called Prof Schach!) believes in gathering data to make predictions. While he accepts that there may be interpretations of data he thinks gathering the correct data is paramount.

He credits Open Source Software with kick starting the Empirical Software Engineering movement saying “We could count the number of lines of code in gcc and Linux – we couldn’t do that with Windows 95!”.

In this interview we discussed empirical software engineer/computer science and some of the work Steve has been doing. This includes his work on the proportion of time that code is in bug fixing mode and his work on global variables in Linux.

The latter work was found to be controversial by the Open Source Community. Steve thought that all he was doing was counting the number of global variable in Linux vs BSD and stating that Linux had far more than is considered wise! This was surprising to Steve, but isn’t that much of a surprise to the people who know how much passion Open Source can generate!

Steve’s website is here http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~srs/ and you can find his publications on his website.

Video: Anandeep interviews Professor Stephen Shach”

Crash Data Collection and Analysis

anandeep — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 18:35:00 GMT

Archana Ganapathi is a Computer Science graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Archana has been working in the area of Empirical Computer Science (which relies on real data rather than theory or simulation) and some of her research is on computer crashes. She worked on collecting data on Windows crashes and is in general interested in the idea of using real data to advance Computer Science.

Here home page is http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~archanag/ . Her paper on Windows crashes is “Crash Data Collection: A Windows Case Study” and another interesting paper she has written is “Why do Internet services fail, and what can be done about it? “

The Open Data Repository link referenced in the video is http://institutes.lanl.gov/data/. This is a temporary link with a public data set as there is currently not an official link for the repository that will eventually be hosted by USENIX. We'll be sure to pass along the official link as soon as it is available.

-Anandeep

Video: Crash Data Collection and Analysis

Khaled El Emam, University of Ottawa, on the ROI of Code Quality

jcannon — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 20:01:00 GMT

Anandeep interviews Khaled El Emam, Professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Khaled's research looks very deeply at how bugs and software defects introduced in software development impact an organization after purchase and deployment. His assertion, the more bugs and issues in deployed software, the more downtime, support and maintenace costs are incurred post-purchase. Thus, evaluating code quality upfront can be a helpful tool in predicting ROI. The less bugs, the less code maintenance. Khaled's research looks at both commercial and open source software development projects and has uncovered some interesting insights.

Video: Khaled El Emam, University of Ottawa, on the ROI of Code Quality

Related Links:
ROI From Software Quality - Samples from Khaled's Book
Check out ROI From Software Quality (Amazon)
Learn more about Khaled El Eman (Short Bio)

Alternative Video Format:
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