Empirical Studies and Data Analysis

DUE: 11:59PM, Friday 3 May 2019

40 points

1. Problems

  1. (20 points) Your company is about to start a new project to develop a new software system. This project will use (for the first time in the company) GitHub to develop the project. The company management has asked you to assess the use of GitHub on this project and make a recommendation on whether or not to use it in other projects. Explain how you might assess the costs and benefits of using GitHub, and what considerations you should make in designing the assessment excercise. Your answer should be no longer than four pages.

    Make sure that you describe and justify (a) the type of study that you propose (experiment, case study, survey, or combination of methods), (b) any hypotheses, (c) study variables, (d) study plan/design, and (e) how you will analyze the results.

  2. (10 points) P. 285, #3. Fenton & Bieman: Three years ago the software development manager introduced changes to the development practices at your company. These changes were supposed to ensure that more time was spent up-front on projects, rather than coding. Suppose you have the following data giving actual effort (in person-days) by software development phase for the last 5 projects (in chronological order). Provide an appropriate graphical representation for the manager so that she can see whether the changes have had an effect. 

                      Proj 1   Proj 2   Proj 3   Proj 4   Proj 5 
Requirements	   120      100      370       80      410
Specification      320      240      490      140      540
High-level design   30       40       90       40       60
Detailed design    170      190      420      120      340
Coding            1010      420      1130     250     1200
Testing            460      300      580       90      550

  3. (10 points) Construct box plots for the number of classes (NumClasses), the number of design patterns (NumPatterns), and the number of faults (Faults) for the systems shown in the table below. Identify the outliers for each plot. Be careful to draw the box plots correctly. What conclusions can you draw? Justify these conclusions. 

    Table for Problem 3: System Measures for Systems S1-S17
------------------------------------
System NumClasses NumPatterns Faults
------------------------------------  
S1       3            0         5  
S2       6            1        20  
S3       8            0        15  
S4      12            6         6  
S5      12            3         5  
S6      19            4        20  
S7      22            3        14  
S8      28            3        11  
S9      34           13        11  
S10     36           12        25  
S11     37            7        19  
S12     38            8        25  
S13     42           13        11  
S14     42           11        23  
S15     54           33        67  
S16     80           19        68         
S17     84           31        52

2. Submission

  • Submit your answers in one PDF file called a10.pdf.
  • Put your name at the top of the each page.
  • Important Reminder: You may use material from the book or other sources in your answers. However, you must cite your sources properly. Any verbatim quotations must be enclosed in quotation marks, with page numbers indicated. You will receive severe point deductions if you use material from the text or other sources that is not properly cited.