Cost and Quality Large-scale Phenomena

The area of my research is Digital Archeology [1]: a study of software developers’ culture and behavior through the recovery, documentation, and analysis of digital remains. These digital traces reflect various projections of collective and individual activity. The fundamental method of Digital Archeology is the reconstruction and quantification of the behavior of an individual, a team, or an organization from these projections. Digital Archeology allows a live, non-intrusive, fine-grained, and practical way to observe, analyze, and support large groups such as software development teams [2], entire companies [3, 4], or an entire population of open source projects [5, 6]. Two decades ago, software development was the only domain with accessible detailed records of people’s activities retrievable from version control and problem tracking systems. The research in the area has experienced a dramatic growth as indicated by the recognition of my early work [2], conferences such as Mining Software Repositories and Mining Software Archives, and adoption of these novel measurement and decision support methods by industry. Some of my early work [2] inspired research in domains not related to software engineering, for example, innovation [7], computer-supported collaborative work [8], management science [9], and others. Combining insights from software development models and software change data I constructed tools optimally to distribute work [10], estimate and present developer expertise [11], and improve the quality of software [12, 13]. I have packaged these tools in the SoftChange system and deployed it in Lucent’s and Avaya’s projects. The measurement and analyses from these tools are used to determine if projects meet their quality targets [13], to guide strategic company decisions [4], and to demonstrate that the reliability of products meets the requirements of existing and prospective customers [13, 14]. Presently, many other forms of human endeavor are recorded in unprecedented detail leading to the explosion of interest in ways to analyze these digital projections [15]. This approach to understanding human activity can be both enhanced by and also advance Digital Archeology and open new opportunities to benefit mankind (see “Vision” Section for more details).