The Department of Information Systems, Statistics and Management Science, prediction of software defects and defect patterns is and will continue to be a critically important software evolution research topic. This study presents a time series analysis of multi‐organizational multi‐project defects reported during ongoing software evolution efforts. Using data from monthly defect reports for eight open source software projects over five years, this study builds and tests time series models for each sampled project. The resulting model accounts for the ripple effects of defect detection and correction by modeling the autocorrelation of code defect data. The autoregressive integrated moving average model (0,1,1) was found to hold for all sampled projects and thus provide a basis for both descriptive and predictive software defect analysis that is computationally efficient, comprehensible, and easy to apply. The model may be used to evaluate and compare the reliability of candidate software solutions, and to facilitate planning for software evolution budget and time allocation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are an important tool used by software engineering researchers to summarize the state of knowledge about a particular topic. Currently, SLR authors must perform the difficult, time-consuming task in largely manual fashion. To identify barriers faced by SLR authors, we conducted an interactive community workshop prior to ESEM'13. Workshop participants generated a total of 100 ideas that, through group discussions, formed 37 composite barriers to the SLR process. Further analysis reveals the barriers relate to latent themes regarding the SLR process, primary studies, the practitioner community, and tooling. This paper describes the barriers identified during the workshop along with a ranking of those barriers that is based on votes by workshop attendees. The paper concludes by describing the impact of these barriers on three important constituencies: SLR Methodology Researchers, SLR Authors and SLR consumers.

Context: With the increasing popularity of the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process, there is also an increasing need for tool support. Objective:The goal of this work was to consult the software engineering researchers who conduct SLRs to identify and prioritize the necessary SLR tool features. Method: To gather information required to address this goal, we invited SLR authors to participate in an interactive 2-hour workshop structured around the Nominal Group Technique. Results: The workshop outcomes indicated that Search & Selection and Collaboration are the two highest priority tool features. The results also showed that most of the high-priority features are not well-supported in current tools. Conclusion: These results support and extend the results of prior work. SLR tool authors can use these findings to guide future development efforts.