When a live site is down or time is of the essence, software teams mobilize to fix bugs as fast as possible. How might such important bugs be fixed more quickly? One answer is through crowdsourcing, where ad-hoc participants are each given small, self-contained microtasks that are then aggregated into an overall solution. To explore this idea, we are currently designing new techniques and tools for crowd debugging.
Microtask crowdsourcing systems such as FoldIt and ESP partition work into short, self-contained microtasks, reducing barriers to contribute, increasing parallelism, and reducing the time to complete work. Could this model be applied to software development? To explore this question, we are designing a development process and cloud-based IDE for crowd development.
This research focuses on techniques for identifying and reducing the costs, streamlining the process, and improving the readiness of future workforce for the acquisition of complex software systems. Emphasis is directed at identifying, tracking, and analyzing software component costs and cost reduction opportunities within acquisition life cycle of open architecture (OA) systems, where such systems combine best-of-breed software components and software products lines (SPLs) that are subject to different intellectual property (IP) license requirements.
Sourcerer is an ongoing research project at the University of California, Irvine aimed at exploring open source projects through the use of code analysis. The existence of an extremely large body of open source code presents a tremendous opportunity for software engineering research. Not only do we leverage this code for our own research, but we provide the open source Sourcerer Infrastructure and curated datasets for other researchers to use.
The Sourcerer Infrastructure is composed of a number of layers.
ISR has long been an internationally recognized leader in research into all aspects of open source software development. In this role, researchers at ISR along with colleagues throughout the U.S. helped to develop a new agenda that can help guide future research into open source software development.
ISR
