Calendar

Prof Bell
Tues 11:45am-1:25pm, Thurs 2:50pm-4:30pm, Richards Hall 325

Class meetings marked as “overview” will be lecture-focused, providing background material to help contextualize the topic. “Discussion” meetings will be highly interactive discussions centered on the required readings.

Please be sure to read the assigned paper before class. Most papers link into the ACM or IEEE library - you can sign in to those services using your Northeastern login (select “Sign in with institutional credentials” and then select Northeastern). Note that for the ACM library, you can create an ACM account and then link it to your Northeastern ID (“My Profile” -> “Institutional Affiliations”) so that you can stay logged in and not need to go through Duo every time that you would like to read a paper.

Week 1: Software Process
Tue, Jan 10 SW Process and Course Overview. Keynote, PDF	Thu, Jan 12 Process Discussion Notes Required Readings: Software Aspects of Strategic Defense Systems. David Parnas. CACM 1985
Week 2: Modularity and Design
Tue, Jan 17 Overview: Modularity, Design and Patterns Keynote, PDF , Notes Required Readings: Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community. Richard Gabriel, 1996. Read ‘Reuse Versus Compression’ (p3-7) and ‘The Quality Without a Name’ (p33-43)	Thu, Jan 19 Discussion: Modularity and Design Notes Required Readings: Aspect-Oriented Programming. Kiczales et al. ECOOP 1997 An empirical study on program comprehension with reactive programming. Salvaneschi et al. FSE 2014
Week 3: Open Source
Tue, Jan 24 Overview: Open Source History and Models Keynote, PDF	Thu, Jan 26 Discussion: Open Source Notes Required Readings: How Has Forking Changed in the Last 20 Years? A Study of Hard Forks on GitHub. Zhou, Vasilescu and Kästner. ICSE 2020 How to Not Get Rich: An Empirical Study of Donations in Open Source. Overney et al. ICSE 2020
Week 4: Mining Software Repositories
Tue, Jan 31 Overview: MSR, metrics Keynote, PDF	Thu, Feb 02 Discussion: Mining Software Repositories Notes Required Readings: The Promises and Perils of Mining GitHub. Kalliamvakou et al. MSR 2014 A Large-Scale Comparison of Python Code in Jupyter Notebooks and Scripts. Grotov et al. MSR 2022
Week 5: Testing: Overview and Oracles
Tue, Feb 07 Overview: Tests and Oracles Keynote, PDF Reflection Paper Proposal Due at 11:00am	Thu, Feb 09 Discussion: Test Oracles Notes Required Readings: Are Mutants a Valid Substitute for Real Faults in Software Testing?. Just et al. FSE 2014 Dynamically Discovering Likely Program Invariants to Support Program Evolution. Ernst, Griswold and Notkin. ICSE 1999
Week 6: Testing: Inputs
Tue, Feb 14 Overview: Input Generation Techniques Keynote, PDF Required Readings: An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities. Miller, Fredriksen and So. CACM 1990 How SQLite is Tested. If you are interested in how SQLite is made, optionally check out: SQLite amalgamation, license	Thu, Feb 16 Project Proposal Brainstorming
Week 7: Testing: Inputs
Tue, Feb 21 Discussion: Fuzzing Notes Required Readings: Automated Testing of Graphics Shader Compilers. Donaldson et al. OOPSLA 2017	Thu, Feb 23 Project Proposal Discussions Preliminary Project Proposal Due at 11:00am
Week 8: CI and Test Suite Maintenance
Tue, Feb 28 Overview: CI and cloud resources Keynote, PDF	Thu, Mar 02 Discussion: CI, more process Notes Required Readings: Trade-Offs in Continuous Integration: Assurance, Security, and Flexibility. Hilton et al. FSE 2017 Taming Google-Scale Continuous Testing. Memon et al. ICSE 2017 Final Project Proposal Due at 11:00am
Week 9: Spring Break
Week 10: Paper Presentations
Tue, Mar 14 Students present their reflection papers Paper presentation order Reflection Paper Due at 11:00am	Thu, Mar 16 Students present their reflection papers Paper presentation order
Week 11: Devops
Tue, Mar 21 Overview: Deployment and Operations Keynote, PDF Required Readings: The $440 Million Software Error at Knight Capital Do The Simple Thing First: The Engineering Behind Instagram	Thu, Mar 23 Discussion: DevOps Notes Required Readings: Canopy: An End-to-End Performance Tracing And Analysis System. Kaldor et al. OSDI 2017 An Evolutionary Study of Configuration Design and Implementation in Cloud Systems. Zhang et al. ICSE 2021
Week 12: Expertise and Knowledge Sharing
Tue, Mar 28 Overview: Collaboration in SE Keynote, PDF Project Status Update Due at 11:00am	Thu, Mar 30 Discussion: Being Great and Helping Others Notes Required Readings: What Makes a Great Software Engineer? Li, Ko and Zhu. ICSE 2015 An Exploratory Study of Sharing Strategic Programming Knowledge. Arab et al. CHI 2022
Week 13: More Human Factors
Tue, Apr 04 Discussion: SE and Data Science Notes Required Readings: What’s Wrong with Computational Notebooks? Pain Points, Needs, and Design Opportunities. Chattopadhyay et al. CHI 2020 Managing Messes in Computational Notebooks. Head et al. CHI 2019	Thu, Apr 06 Discussion: Barriers to Diversity in SE Required Readings: “STILL AROUND”: Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers. Breukelen et al. ICSE 2023 Open source barriers to entry, revisited: A sociotechnical perspective. Mendez et al. ICSE 2018
Week 14: Security
Tue, Apr 11 Overview: Security and SE, Malicious Components Keynote, PDF Required Readings: What Are Weak Links in the Npm Supply Chain?. Zahan et al. ICSE 2022 Practical Automated Detection of Malicious Npm Packages. Sejfia and Schäfer. ICSE 2022	Thu, Apr 13 Discussion: Security and Course Postmortem Notes Required Readings: Why secret detection tools are not enough: It’s not just about false positives - An industrial case study. Rahman et al. Empirical Software Engineering, 2022
Week 15: Project Presentations
Tue, Apr 18 Students present their projects Project Report Due at 11:00am	Thu, Apr 20 Students present their projects