The Shape of Code

My book, Evidence-based software engineering: based on the publicly available data is now out on beta release (pdf, and code+data). The plan is for a three-month review, with the final version available in the shops in time for Christmas (I plan to get a few hundred printed, and made available on Amazon).

The next few months will be spent responding to reader comments, and adding material from the remaining 20 odd datasets I have waiting to be analysed.

You can either email me with any comments, or add an issue to the book’s Github page.

While the content is very different from my original thoughts, 10-years ago, the original aim of discussing all the publicly available software engineering data has been carried through (in some cases more detailed data, in greater quantity, has supplanted earlier less detailed/smaller datasets).

The aim of only discussing a topic if public data is available, has been slightly bent in places (because I thought data would turn up, and it didn’t, or I wanted to connect two datasets, or I have not yet deleted what has been written).

The outcome of these two aims is that the flow of discussion is very disjoint, even disconnected. Another reason might be that I have not yet figured out how to connect the material in a sensible way. I’m the first person to go through this exercise, so I have no idea where it’s going.

The roughly 620+ datasets is three to four times larger than I thought was publicly available. More data is good news, but required more time to analyse and discuss.

Depending on the quantity of issues raised, updates of the beta release will happen.

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