Author Archives: Tomi Männistö

About Tomi Männistö

Professor, Software Engineering

Cookbook for the systematic experimentation

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The ESE research group has authored a cookbook for continuous experimentation based on the research in the N4S research program.

Continuous experimentation Cookbook – An introduction to systematic experimentation for software-intensive businesses provides an introduction to continuous experimentation, which is a systematic way to continuously test your product or service value and whether your business strategy is working.

An increasing number of companies are involved in building software-intensive products and services – hence the popular slogan “every business is a software business”. Software allows companies to disrupt existing markets because of its flexibility. This creates highly dynamic and competitive environments, imposing high risks to businesses. One risk is that the product or service is of only little or no value to customers, meaning the effort to develop it is wasted. In order to reduce such risks, you can adopt an experiment-driven development approach where you validate your product ideas before spending resources on fully developing them. Experiments allow you to test assumptions about what customers really want and react if the assumptions are wrong.

This book provides an introduction to continuous experimentation, which is a systematic way to continuously test your product or service value and whether your business strategy is working. With real case examples from Ericsson, Solita, Vaadin, and Bittium, the book not only gives you the concepts needed to start performing continuous experimentation, but also shows you how others have been doing it.

The cookbook was a deliverable in the N4S program.

A Roadmap to the Programmable World: Software Challenges in the IoT Era

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The emergence of millions of remotely programmable devices in our surroundings
will pose signicant challenges for software developers. A roadmap from today’s cloud-centric, data-centric Internet of Things systems to the Programmable World highlights those challenges that haven’t received enough attention.

Author’s post-print version (pdf), which in is content equal to the fully formatted, published version available from IEEE:

Taivalsaari, Antero and Mikkonen, Tommi, 2017. A Roadmap to the Programmable World: Software Challenges in the IoT Era. Software, IEEE, 34(1), pp.72–80. doi:10.1109/MS.2017.26

 

Scientific Writing – Guide of the Empirical Software Engineering Research Group

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We have written some instructions to help the students in scientific writing. Learning scientific writing provides the ability to express one’s thoughts with particular clarity and communicate them in a manner that seasoned scientists find easy to follow.

The guidelines are applicable for seminar reports, B.Sc. and M.Sc. theses and also when aiming to write your first scientific publication. The guide is intended for software engineering and related areas of research. They are not necessarily directly applicable to other fields, e.g., theoretical computer science.

Please, read the guide before starting your thesis work: Scientific Writing – Guide of the Empirical Software Engineering Research Group

BTW. From the ESE research group’s web pages, you can also find some thesis topics of interest to the research group, some provided by our industrial collaborators.

Refactoring: a Shot in the Dark?

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A paper published in IEEE Software on how the practitioners viewed the role and importance of refactoring, and how and when they refactored. The study was based on the interviews of 12 seasoned software architects and developers at nine Finnish companies.

The respondents considered refactoring to be valuable but had difficulty explaining and justifying it to management and customers and did not use measurements to quantify the need for or impact of refactoring. Refactoring often occurred in conjunction with the development of new features because it seemed to require a clear business need.

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Author’s post-print version (pdf): Leppänen et al. 2015, “Refactoring-a Shot in the Dark?”

Leppänen, Marko; Mäkinen, Simo; Lahtinen, Samuel; Sievi-Korte, Outi; Tuovinen, Antti-Pekka; Männisto, Tomi, “Refactoring-a Shot in the Dark?,” in Software, IEEE, vol.32, no.6, pp.62-70, Nov.-Dec. 2015.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7310989

 

Performance variability in Software Product Lines (Paper in Empirical Software Engineering journal)

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It is typically features that vary in a software product line. This paper reaches further with the aim of understanding the quality attribute variability, performance in this case. The paper is a result from the close collaboration of ESE research group at the University of Helsinki with Aalto University and the case company Nokia.

Myllärniemi, V, Savolainen, J, Raatikainen M and Männistö T, 2015. Performance variability in software product lines: proposing theories from a case study. Empirical Software Engineering (published online: .
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10664-014-9359-z

Empirical Software Engineering blog!

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This is the blog of the Empirical Software Engineering Research Group at the University of Helsinki. We address software engineering research problems and challenges with industrial relevance or origin. We emphasise the empirical aspect of the research, in particular by applying research methods that enable us gaining deep understanding of software development.