The Shape of Code

Software engineering is one of the topics in this year’s summer internships being sponsored by R-Studio. The spec says: “Data Science Training for Software Engineers – Develop course materials to teach basic data analysis to programmers using software engineering problems and data sets.”

It’s good to see interest in data analysis of software engineering data start to gain traction.

What topics might basic data analysis for programmers include? I have written about statistical techniques that I think are useful in software engineering, but I don’t think this list would be regarded as basic. Techniques that are think are basic are:

• a picture is worth a thousand words, so obviously visualization is a major topic,
• building regression models is good for helping to understand what is going on.

Anything else? Well, I don’t know.

An alternative approach to teaching basic data analysis is to give examples of the kind of useful things it can be used to do. Software developers are fast learners, and given the motivation have the skills needed to find and learn techniques that they think are of use. In a basic course, I would put the emphasis on motivating developers to think that data analysis can help them do a better job.

I would NOT, repeat, not, include any material on machine learning. Software engineering data sets tend to be too small to obtain reliable results from machine learning, and I don’t want to encourage clueless button pushers.

What are the desirable skills in the summer intern? I would say that being able to write readable material is the most important, with statistical knowledge ranked second; the level of software engineering knowledge is unimportant. Data analysis tends to follow the same pattern whatever the subject; so it’s important to get somebody who knows about data analysis.

A social science major is the obvious demographic for this intern (they do lots of data analysis); the last people to consider are students majoring in a computing subject.