Certus researcher Leon Moonen participated in the recent ICSE 2019 and co-located conferences MSR and ICPC in Montreal, Canada. He was also invited to participate in the ML4SE workshop organized after the ICSE week at Google Montreal.
The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is the premier venue where researchers and practitioners get together to presen and discuss recent research results in the field of software engineering. ICSE 2019 attracted around 1300 participants. Highlights included a keynote by Margaret-Anne Storey (UVic) that called for reflection on the extent to which current SE research impacts software developer productivity and discussed ways in which this could be improved (slides/recorded talk) and a keynote by Joelle Pineau (McGill & Facebook AI) on Building Reproducible, Reusable, and Robust Machine Learning Software (slides/recorded talk). In her talk, she discussed a Machine Learning Reproducibility Checklist that was created to help ensure reproducability of machine learning results/papers.
The International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is a conference for researchers and practitioners that analyze the rich data available in software repositories such as source control systems, project communication archives, defect tracking systems and build systems to uncover interesting and actionable information about software systems and projects. One of the highlights was a keynote by Rob DeLine (Microsoft Research) who discussed how data scientists in software engineering teams now routinely do the types of analysis that MSR was created for and sketched a number of new directions for the community to explore, including privacy preserving repository mining, models that can be understood by all stakeholders, and avoiding bias in mining results.
The International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) is the premier venue for researchers and practitioners to present and to discuss state-of-the-art results and best practices in the field of program comprehension. It encompasses both human activities for comprehending the software and technologies for supporting such comprehension. ICPC 2019 featured a keynote by Westley Weimer who discussed how in the last few years, high-resolution medical imaging technologies such as function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) have grown in popularity for conducting research in program comprehension. He gave an overview of recent results, discussed challenges of this type of research and concluded with a call to arms based on a number of compelling ideas and experiments from psychology that have not yet been applied to program comprehension research.
The Workshop on Machine Learning for Software Engineering (ML4SE) brought together a group of researchers interested in data-driven software engineering, basically the intersection of software engineering and machine learning research. There is great promise for data-driven techniques to assist with software development and maintenance tasks such as code & test recommendations, automated software assessments / bug detection, automated program repair, etc. We discussed recent advances in this area, what challenges remain, and shared ideas for how to continue progressing forward.