Browsing by Subject "Empirical study"

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A case study of cross-branch porting in Linux Kernel
(2014-05) Hua, Jinru; Kim, Miryung
To meet different requirements for different stakeholders, branches are widely used to maintain multiple product variants simultaneously. For example, Linux Kernel has a main development branch, known as the mainline; 35 branches to maintain older product versions which are called stable branches; and hundreds of branches for experimental features. To maintain multiple branch-based product variants in parallel, developers often port new features or bug-fixes from one branch to another. In particular, the process of propagating bug-fixes or feature additions to an older version is commonly called backporting. Prior to our study, backporting practices in large scale projects have not been systematically studied. This lack of empirical knowledge makes it difficult to improve the current backporting process in the industry. We hypothesized that cross-branch porting practice is frequent, repetitive, and error-prone. It required significant effort for developers to select patches that need to be backported and then apply them to the target implementation. We carried out two complementary studies to examine this hypothesis. To investigate the extent and effort of porting practice, this thesis first conducted a quantitative study of backporting activities in Linux Kernel with a total of 8 years version history using the data of the main branch and the 35 stable branches. Our study showed that backporting happened at a rate of 149 changes per month, and it took 51 days to propagate patches on average. 40% of changes in the stable branches were ported from the mainline and 64% of ported patches propagated to more than one branch. Out of all backporting changes from the mainline to stable branches, 97.5% were applied without any manual modifications. To understand how Linux Kernel developers keep up to date with development activities across different branches, we carried out an online survey with engineers who may have ported code from the mainline to stable branches based on our prior analysis of Linux Kernel version history. We received 14 complete responses. The participants have 12.6 years of Linux development experience on average and are either maintainers or experts of Linux Kernel. The survey showed that most backporting work was done by the maintainers who knew the program quite well. Those experienced maintainers could easily identify the edits that need to be ported and propagate them with all relevant changes to ensure consistency in multiple branches. Inexperience developers were seldom given an opportunity to backport features or bug-fixes to stable branches. In summary, based on the version history study and the online survey, we concluded that cross-branch porting is frequent, periodic, and repetitive. It required a manual effort to selectively identify the changes that need to be ported, to analyze the dependency of the selected changes, and to apply all required changes to ensure consistency. To eliminate human's omission mistakes, most backporting work was done only by experienced maintainers who could identify all relevant changes along with the change that needed to be backported. Currently inexperienced developers were excluded from cross-branch porting activities from the mainline to stable branches in Linux Kernel. Our results call for an automated approach to identify the patches that require to be ported, to collect context information to help developers become aware of relevant changes, and to notify pertinent developers who may be responsible for the corresponding porting events.
An empirical study of SD signal delay versus temperature in a plenum grade coaxial cable
(2010-12) Kaur, Sukhdeep; Flake, Robert H.; Davis, John H.
A high resolution speedy delivery time domain reflectometer (SD/TDR) has been developed in the Electrical Engineering department at The University of Texas at Austin. The SD/TDR uses a novel non-sinusoidal signal that does not undergo dispersion during transmission in a lossy media. SD/TDR is used to estimate the length and detect the location of faults in the transmission lines. Time of flight (TOF) is one of the critical parameters of SD/TDR and a function of several temperature dependent factors. Given the TOF and length of a transmission line, signal delay can be computed. This research presents an empirical study of the effect of temperature on the TOF in a plenum grade coaxial cable for temperatures ranging from -3 °C to 60 °C. We also study the effect of temperature on characteristic impedance of the coaxial cable. Finally, a SD double exponential waveform is used to estimate TOF for calibrated short and open terminations.
An empirical study on software quality : developer perception of quality, metrics, and visualizations
(2013-05) Wilson, Gary Lynn; Kim, Miryung
Software tends to decline in quality over time, causing development and maintenance costs to rise. However, by measuring, tracking, and controlling quality during the lifetime of a software product, its technical debt can be held in check, reducing total cost of ownership. The measurement of quality faces challenges due to disagreement in the meaning of software quality, the inability to directly measure quality factors, and the lack of measurement practice in the software industry. This report addresses these challenges through both a literature survey, a metrics derivation process, and a survey of professional software developers. Definitions of software quality from the literature are presented and evaluated with responses from software professionals. A goal, question, metric process is used to derive quality-targeted metrics tracing back to a set of seven code-quality subgoals, while a survey to software professionals shows that despite agreement that metrics and metric visualizations would be useful for improving software quality, the techniques are underutilized in practice.