Publications by Derek Jones
Producing software for money and/or recognition
In the commercial environment money makes the world go around, while in academia recognition (e.g., number of times your work is cited, being fawned over at conferences, impressive job titles) is the coin of the realm (there are a few odd balls who do it out of love for the subject or a desire to understand how things work, but modern academia is...
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Automatically generated join-the-dots images
It is interesting to try and figure out what picture emerges from a join-the-dots puzzle (connect-the-dots in some parts of the world). Let’s have a go at some lightweight automatic generation such a puzzle (some heavy-weight techniques). If an image is available, expressed as an boolean matrix, R’s sample function can be used to select a sm...
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Empirical Software Engineering using R: first draft available for download
A draft of my book Empirical Software Engineering using R is now available for download. The book essentially comes in two parts: statistical techniques that are useful for analyzing software engineering data. This draft release contains most of the techniques I plan to cover. I am interested in hearing about any techniques you think ought to ...
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Economics chapter added to “Empirical software engineering using R”
The Economics chapter of my Empirical software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). This is a slim chapter, it might grow a bit, but I suspect not by a huge amount. Reasons include lots of interesting data being confidential and me not having spent a lot of time on this topic over the years (so my stash of accumulate...
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Warp your data to make it visually appealing
Data plots can sometimes look very dull and need to be jazzed up a bit. Now, nobody’s suggesting that the important statistical properties of the data be changed, but wouldn’t it be useful if the points could be moved around a bit, to create something visually appealing without losing the desired statistical properties? Readers have to agree...
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Ecosystems chapter added to “Empirical software engineering using R”
The Ecosystems chapter of my Empirical software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). I don’t seem to be able to get away from rewriting everything, despite working on the software engineering material for many years. Fortunately the sparsity of the data keeps me in check, but I keep finding new and interesting dat...
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Projects chapter added to “Empirical software engineering using R”
The Projects chapter of my Empirical software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). This material turned out to be harder to bring together than I had expected. Building software projects is a bit like making sausages in that you don’t want to know the details, or in this case those involved are not overly keen to re...
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Data-set update to “Empirical software engineering using R”
The pile of papers, books and data-sets, relating to previously released draft chapters of my Empirical software engineering book, has been growing, and cluttering up my mind. I decided to have a clear-out. A couple of things stood out. There are around 25 data-sets that have been promised but not yet arrived. If you encounter anybody who mentio...
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Reliability chapter added to “Empirical software engineering using R”
The Reliability chapter of my Empirical software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). I have been working on this draft for four months and it still needs lots of work; time to move on and let it stew for a while. Part of the problem is lack of public data; cost and schedule overruns can be rather public (projects ch...
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Source code chapter added to “Evidence-based software engineering using R”
The Source Code chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book has been added to the draft pdf (download here). This chapter has suffered from coming last and there is still lots of work to be done. Almost all the source code related data has been plundered to fill up earlier chapters. Some data did not make the cut-off for release of t...
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