Andreas Zeller has been honored with yet another Most Influential Paper Award from the MSR conference in Melbourne. Andreas received the award for his paper “The impact of tangled code changes”, which he presented together with Kim Herzig at the MSR in 2013. The jury considers this paper to have been the most influential publication of that conference.
What's the paper about, in brief?
Developers are continuously carrying out code changes, for example when fixing bugs. These changes can be tracked in the version history, allowing for an analysis of the program parts that were fixed repeatedly and would therefore seem especially vulnerable. In their paper “The impact of tangled code changes”, Zeller and Herzig show that committing several unrelated code changes in a single transaction has an adverse effect on bug counting models: Changes appear to be related even if they are not, leading to noise in the version history and compromising the data quality. The paper pleads the case for a better organization of code changes.
About Andreas Zeller
Andreas Zeller is a CISPA Faculty as well as Professor of Software Engineering at Saarland University. His research focuses on the development and analysis of complex software systems. His work has a far-reaching impact on everyday life. For example, techniques developed in Zeller's research group are in use 24/7 to secure web browsers such as Chrome, Edge or Firefox or to identify suspicious Android apps at an early stage. Zeller is an ACM Fellow and has received, among numerous others, an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award and two ERC Advanced Grants.
This is his seventh Most Influential Paper Award.
