The BSEL seminar was held at WLFB 207/208 (2nd floor of Wilfred Brown) at 2:00PM.
A talk from Dr Andrea Capiluppi titled ‘The Relevance of Application Domains in Empirical Findings’ (slides can be found here).
Research on empirical software engineering has increasingly used data from online repositories or collective efforts. The latest trends for researchers is to gather as much data as possible to (i) prevent bias in the representation of a small sample, (ii) work with a sample as close as the population itself, and (iii) showcase the performance of existing or new tools in treating vast amount of data. The effects of harvesting enormous amounts of data have been only marginally considered so far: data could be corrupted; repositories could be forked; and developer identities could be duplicated. In this paper we posit that there is a fundamental flaw in harvesting large amounts of data, and when generalising the conclusions: the application domain, or context, of the analysed systems must be the primary factor for the cluster sampling of FOSS projects. In this talk we analyse a sample of software systems, and using an existing approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we derive their application domains. We extract a suite structural OO metrics from each project, and cluster projects by domains: we show that most of the chosen metrics come from different populations, and are based on the application domains.
