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ASE 2020
Mon 21 - Fri 25 September 2020 Melbourne, Australia
Tue 22 Sep 2020 08:40 - 09:00 at Koala - Maintenance and Evolution (2) Chair(s): Cuiyun Gao

Developers continuously invent new practices, usually grounded in hard-won experience, not theory. Game theory studies cooperation and conflict; its use will speed the development of effective processes. A survey of game theory in software engineering finds highly idealised models that are rarely based on process data. This is because software processes are hard to analyse using traditional game theory since they generate huge game models. We are the first to show how to use game abstractions, developed in artificial intelligence, to produce tractable game-theoretic models of software practices. We present Game-Theoretic Process Improvement (GTPI), built on top of empirical game-theoretic analysis. Some teams fall into the habit of preferring “quick-and-dirty” code to slow-to-write, careful code, incurring technical debt. We showcase GTPI’s ability to diagnose and improve such a development process. Using GTPI, we discover a lightweight intervention that incentivises developers to write careful code: add a single code reviewer who needs to catch only 25% of kludges. This 25% accuracy is key; it means that a reviewer does not need to examine each commit in-depth, making this process intervention cost-effective.

Tue 22 Sep
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08:00 - 09:00: Maintenance and Evolution (2)Research Papers / Journal-first Papers at Koala
Chair(s): Cuiyun GaoHarbin Institute of Technology
08:00 - 08:20
Talk
M3: Semantic API Migrations
Research Papers
Bruce CollieUniversity of Edinburgh, Philip GinsbachGitHub Software UK, Jackson WoodruffUniversity of Edinburgh, Ajitha RajanUniversity of Edinburgh, Michael F. P. O'BoyleUniversity of Edinburgh
Pre-print Media Attached
08:20 - 08:40
Talk
The Impact of Generic Data Structures: Decoding the Role of Lists in the Linux Kernel
Research Papers
Nic VolanschiInria Bordeaux, Julia LawallInria
Pre-print
08:40 - 09:00
Talk
Game-theoretic Analysis of Development Practices: Challenges and Opportunities
Journal-first Papers
Carlos Gavidia-CalderonUniversity College London, Federica SarroUniversity College London, UK, Mark HarmanUniversity College London, UK, Earl T. BarrUniversity College London, UK
Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached