The Shape of Code

I have completed the polishing/correcting/fiddling of the eight statistical analysis related chapters of my evidence-based software engineering book, and an updated draft pdf is now available (download here).

The material was in much better shape than I recalled, after abandoning it to the world 2-years ago, to work on the software engineering chapters.

Changes include moving more figures into the margin (which is responsible for a lot of the reduction in page count), fixing grammatical typos, removing place-holders for statistical techniques that are unlikely to be of general interest to software engineers, and mostly minor shuffling around (the only big change was moving a lot of material from the Experiments chapter to the Statistics chapter).

There is still some work to be done, in places (most notably the section on surveys).

What next? My collection of data waiting to be analysed has been piling up, so I will spend the next month reducing the backlog.

The six chapters covering the major areas of software engineering need to be polished and fleshed out, from their current bare-bones state. All being well, this time next year a beta release will be ready.

While working on the statistical material, I have been making monthly updates to the pdf+data available. If it makes sense to do this for the rest of the material, then it will happen. I’m not going to write a blog post every month; perhaps a post after what look like important milestones.

As always, if you know of any interesting software engineering data, please tell me.