Software Engineering

Issue Tracking Systems: What Developers Want and Use

An Issue Tracking System (ITS) allows a developer to keep track of, prioritize, and assign multitudes of bugs, feature requests, and other development tasks such as testing. Despite ITSs play a significant role in day-to-day developers’ activities, no previous study investigated what developers want and use in an ITS. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a feature matrix that maps six of the most used ITS to features, and second, we measure the developers’ level of use and perceived importance of each feature.

Discovery in Negligence Analysis: Evolution of a Sufficiently Safe Spec

Negligence liability is a rapidly increasing area of concern for software engineers and designers. The implications of negligence are sufficiently severe that most companies can no longer ignore the legal consequences of engineering design decisions [1][2]. As engineers and industry participants, it is our duty to balance the interests of public safety against our own profits.

Rethinking Software Process: The Key to Negligence Liability

The risk of negligence liability can be considerably reduced by application of basic legal concepts early in the development lifecycle. The costs of preparing and defending a suit can be considerably reduced as well. This paper develops a simple model for integration of these considerations into the development process. The model stresses the following: 1. early consideration of process constraints derived from negligence law; 2. explicit consideration of such constraints during the development process; and, 3. documentation of all significant tradeoffs that is traceable to key constraints.
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