The Shape of Code

Since the start of this year, I have been telling people that I willing to analyze their software engineering data for free, provided they are willing to make the data public; I also offer to anonymize the data for them, as part of the free service. Alternatively you could read this book, and do the analysis yourself.

What will you get out of me analyzing your data?

My aim is to find patterns of behavior that will be useful to you. What is useful to you? You have to be the judge of that. It is possible that I will not find anything useful, or perhaps any patterns at all; this does not happen very often. Over the last year I have found (what I think are useful) patterns in several hundred datasets, with one dataset that I am still scratching my head over it.

Data analysis is a two-way conversation. I find some patterns, and we chat about them, hopefully you will say one of them is useful, or point me in a related direction, or even a completely new direction; the process is iterative.

The requirement that an anonymized form of the data be made public is likely to significantly reduce the offers I receive.

There is another requirement that I don’t say much about: the data has to be interesting.

What makes software engineering data interesting, or at least interesting to me?

There has to be lots of it. How much is lots?

Well, that depends on the kind of data. Many kinds of measurements of source code are generally available by the truck load. Measurements relating to human involvement in software development are harder to come by, but becoming more common.

If somebody has a few thousand measurements of some development related software activity, I am very interested. However, depending on the topic, I might even be interested in a couple of dozen measurements.

Some measurements are very rare, and I would settle for as few as two measurements. For instance, multiple implementations of the same set of requirements provides information on system development variability; I was interested in five measurements of the lines of source in five distinct Pascal compilers for the same machine.

Effort estimation data used to be rare; published papers sometimes used to include a table containing the estimate/actual data, which was once gold-dust. These days I would probably only be interested if there were a few hundred estimates, but it would depend on what was being estimated.

If you have some software engineering data that you think I might be interested in, please email to tell me something about the data (and perhaps what you would like to know about it). I’m always open to a chat.

If we both agree that it’s worth looking at your data (I will ask you to confirm that you have the rights to make it public), then you send me the data and off we go.