A4: Empirical Studies and Data Analysis
DUE: 11:59PM, Monday 2 October 2017
40 points
1. Problems
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(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.
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(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 -
(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 a4.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.
