Aug28 '15 by Admin

Dr. Menzies submits his paper titled “Live and Let Die? (Delayed Issues not Harder to Resolve)” to ICSE 2016. This is a joint work with Dr. William R. Nichols, Dr. Forrest Shulland Dr. Lucas Layman.

Title: Live and Let Die? (Delayed Issues not Harder to Resolve)

Abstract: Many practitioners and academics believe in a delayed issue effect (DIE); i.e. as issues linger longer in a system, they become exponentially harder to resolve. This belief is often used to justify major investments in new development processes that promise to retire more issues, sooner. This paper tests for the delayed issue effect in 171 software projects conducted around the world in the period from 2006–2014. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest study yet published on this effect. We found no evidence for the delayed issue effect; i.e. the time to resolve issues in a later phase was not consistently more than when issues were resolved soon after their introduction. This result begs the question: how many other long-held beliefs in software engineering are unsupported by current data?