CSC News

October 03, 2007

Layman, Williams, St. Amant Win Best Paper Award at ESEM 2007

Phot of Lucas LaymanCongratulations to doctoral candidate Lucas Layman, and associate professors Drs. Laurie Williams and Robert St. Amant, as their paper, “Toward Reducing Fault Fix Time: Understanding Developer Behavior for the Design of Automated Fault Detection Tools”, won the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) 2007, held on September 20-21, 2007 in Madrid, Spain.

The paper chronicles a controlled study conducted with 18 software developers to explore what factors are used by developers to decide whether or not to address a fault when notified of the error.  The findings of their study lead to several conclusions about the design of Automated Fault Detection (AFD) tools to effectively notify developers of faults in the coding phase.  First the AFD tools should present fault information that is relevant to the primary programming task with accurate and precise descriptions.  Second, the fault severity and the specific timing of fault notification should be customizable.  Finally, the AFD tool must be accurate and reliable to build trust with the developer.
 
The objective of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) is to provide a forum where researchers and practitioners can report and discuss recent research results in the area of empirical software engineering and metrics.

This conference encourages the exchange of ideas that help understand, from an empirical viewpoint, the strengths and weaknesses of software engineering technologies. The conference focuses on the processes, design and structure of empirical studies, and the results of specific studies. These studies may vary from controlled experiments to field studies and from quantitative to qualitative studies.

The best papers in the symposium will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering.

Layman is co-advised by Williams and St. Amant.

~jeffers~

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