SHF: EAGER: A first empirical test of low ceremony evidence for assessing quality attributes

现代社会的方方面面，从医疗保健到国防，都依赖于价格合理、可靠的软件。反过来，这种软件的可用性取决于帮助软件工程师找到可以组装成最终软件的高质量组件。目前，Web站点提供对数百万个组件的访问，这些组件执行与网络、图形、数据处理和数千个其他功能相关的重要操作。然而，软件工程师缺乏一种经过验证的、可靠的方法来选择可以在新的软件应用程序中重用的高质量组件。由于缺乏这样的方法，软件工程师有时会使用一些回想起来极其难以重用的组件。这种困难，反过来，增加了创建软件所需的时间，软件的成本，以及潜在的细微错误。该研究项目旨在为快速评估组件的可重用性提供一个经过验证的、可靠的模型。该方法将利用“低仪式证据”（low-ceremony evidence， LCE）：描述组件质量的不同方面的信息，这些信息是增量的，通常是非正式的，潜在地依赖于上下文，并且经常是矛盾的。LCE的示例包括组件的审查、错误报告和下载计数。虽然LCE的每个部分只能提供对组件质量的不完整视角，但初步工作表明，LCE的综合可以提供有关组件质量的高度信息。这个新的研究项目(1)将使用因素分析来确定LCE的哪些部分是相互一致的，产生用于评估质量的一个或多个方面（如可重用性）的尺度，并且(2)将统计地测试这些尺度与软件工程师报告的重用这些组件的实际经验困难之间的关联程度。由此产生的有效量表有望用于在线网站中组件质量的自动评估。这将使得在未来的工作中开发增强的搜索引擎成为可能，使软件工程师能够快速找到高质量的组件，他们可以使用这些组件来创建社会需要的软件。

Every aspect of modern society, ranging from health care to national defense, depends on the availability of affordable, reliable software. The availability of this software, in turns, depends on helping software engineers to find high-quality components that they can assemble into finished software. Web sites currently provide access to millions of components that perform vital operations related to networking, graphics, data processing, and thousands of other functions. However, software engineers lack a validated, reliable method for selecting high-quality components that they can reuse in new software applications. Lacking such a method, software engineers sometimes use components that turn out, in retrospect, to be extremely difficult to reuse. This difficulty, in turn, increases the time required to create software, the cost of that software, and the potential for subtle bugs.This research project is expected to provide a validated, reliable model for quickly assessing the reusability of components. This method will make use of "low-ceremony evidence" (LCE): information that characterizes different aspects of component quality yet is incremental, often informal, potentially context-dependent, and frequently contradictory. Examples of LCE include reviews, bug reports, and download counts of components. While each piece of LCE provides only an incomplete perspective into a component's quality, preliminary work suggests that the synthesis of LCE can be highly informative about component quality. This new research project (1) will use factor analysis to determine which pieces of LCE are mutually consistent, yielding scales for assessing one or more aspects of quality such as reusability, and (2) will statistically test how well these scales are correlated with the actual empirical difficulty that software engineers report with reusing those components. The resulting validated scales are expected to be useful for automatically assessing the quality of components in online websites. This would make it possible in future work to develop enhanced search engines enabling software engineers to quickly find high-quality components that they can use to create the software that society needs.