We are delighted to report that a group of five MSc Software Systems Engineering and MSc Financial Systems Engineering students from the Department of Computer Science has been accepted to present at the 2018 Conference for Mining Software Repositories (MSR).

The successful students came up with the idea for their submission in a piece of coursework for the UCL COMPGS04 module entitled ‘Tools and Environments’. By combing the latest thinking in software engineering and decades of academic staff members’ experience working on real-life projects, the module prepares students for the fundamental practices of any software professional.

“I am delighted that the students have done so well,” said Dr Jens Krinke, who leads on this module. “I introduced this coursework three years ago, where students come up with ideas and form groups to analyse their ideas and create a potential submission for the mining challenge track. Each year, one of the students’ reports has actually been submitted.”

The conference, which will take place in May in Gothenburg, Sweden, is A-ranked, and has hosted a mining challenge since 2006. This challenge encourages a close connection between research and industry by analysing a common data set.

This year, the challenge is on Enriched Event Streams, which is a public data set for empirical studies on in-IDE activities of software developers. The data set contains over 11M events that correspond to 15K hours of working time of 81 developers. Enriched Event Streams can help to answer some vital research questions, such as:

  • Which IDE commands do developer use?
  • Does refactoring lead to more failed tests?
  • What kind of changes do developers revert?
  • How do developers navigate the code base?

Dr Jens Krinke is Director of the Centre for Research on Evolution Search & Testing (CREST) at UCL in the Software Systems Engineering Group and Programme Director of the MSc Software Systems Engineering and MSc Financial Systems Engineering. He understands that a good knowledge of the nature and variety of software tools and environments is critical for the next generation of software engineers in industry: “The Computer Science department is very proud of its industry-relevant teaching, and this success serves as a further example of how we address the Connected Curriculum at UCL.”

Professor Alexandra Silva, who is Departmental Tutor for Computer Science, praised the students’ engagement with and enthusiasm for their studies: “It is always a great pleasure to see our students actively engaged in current research and making valuable contributions to the scientific community. This success is a testament to the open and inclusive atmosphere we have in the Computer Science department, making the students feel part of the department and its many activities!"

Please join us in congratulating our students, and their dedicated Teaching Assistants, on their success:

Students: John Wilkie, Ziad Al Halabi, Alperen Karaoglu, Jiafeng Liao and George Ndungu

Teaching Assistants: Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul, Matheus Paixão