Software Engineering Research

My general research field is the study and improvement of software development at the organizational, team, and individual level. I empirically examine the use of various software development techniques by industry teams and use this data to create techniques that improve business concerns such as software quality, planning accuracy and team coordination. I study users' interaction with their environment to create novel tools that support they way they actually work. I apply the techniques of empirical software engineering to ground my research in results from real software developers and software teams and to improve transfer from research to commercial practice.

Lucas Layman, Forrest Shull, Paul Componation, Sue O'Brien, Dawn Sabados, Anne Carrigy, Richard Turner, "Systematic Mapping of System Engineering Challenges to Recommended Approaches", IEEE Systems Conference 2010 (SysConf '10), pp. 294-299.
[LNG08] Lucas Layman, Nachiappan Nagappan, Sam Guckenheimer, Jeff Beehler, Andrew Begel, "Mining Software Effort Data: Preliminary Analysis of Visual Studio Team System Data," Proceedings of the 5th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR '08), pp. 43-46.
[WLA05] Laurie Williams, Lucas Layman, Pekka Abrahamsson, "On Establishing the Essential Components of a Technology-Dependent Framework: A Strawman Framework for Industrial Case Study-Based Research," Workshop on Realising Evidence-Based Software Engineering (REBSE '05), St. Louis, MO, May 17, 2005, pp. 1-5.

Software Safety and Reliability

Since joining Fraunhofer CESE, I have been project lead for the NASA Software Safety Risk Metrics project funded by the NASA Software Assurance Research Program. We have developed software safety risk metrics for the NASA Constellation program for project managerss to assess the state of software safety in large-scale systems. In 2007, I worked with Nachi Nagappan at Microsoft Research to investigate statistical fault prediction and to study effort estimation in a large-scale software project at Microsoft.

Lucas Layman, Victor R. Basili, Marvin V. Zelkowitz, Karen L. Fisher, "A Case Study of Measuring Process Risk for Early Insights into Software Safety", Proceedings of the 33rd Int'l Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011), pp. 623-632.
Victor R. Basili, Lucas Layman, Marvin V. Zelkowitz, "A Methodology for Exposing Software Development Risk in Emergent System Properties", Fraunhofer CESE TR# 11-101, 2011.
Victor R. Basili, Marvin V. Zelkowitz, Lucas Layman, Kathleen Dangle, Madeline Diep, "Obtaining Valid Safety Data for Software Safety Measurement and Process Improvement," Proceedings of the 4th joint symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Metrics (ESEM '10).
Lucas Layman, Victor R. Basili, Marvin V. Zelkowitz, "The Role and Quality of Software Safety in the NASA Constellation Program", NASA TR #20100025500, 2010.
[LKN08] Lucas Layman, Gunnar Kudrjavets, Nachiappan Nagappan, "Iterative Identification of Fault-Prone Binaries Using In-Process Metrics," Proceedings of the 2nd joint symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Metrics (ESEM '08), pp. 206-212.

Agile Software Development

Together with my advisor Laurie Williams and Bill Krebs of IBM, we published several empirical case studies assessing the impact and applicability of agile software development methodologies with software teams at IBM, Sabre Airline Solutions and Tekelec. These studies found that, in general, the teams experienced increases in product quality and customer satisfaction. Our article performing a systematic review of the evidence supporting or discounting the benefits of test-driven development was recently included in O'Reilly's "Making Software: What REally Works, and Why We Believe It".

Forrest Shull, Grigori Melnik, Burak Turhan, Lucas Layman, Madeline Diep and Hakan Erdogmus, “What do we know about Test-Driven Development?”, IEEE Software, 27(6):16-19, November/December 2010.
Burak Turhan, Lucas Layman, Madeline Diep, Hakan Erdogmus, Forrest Shull, "How Effective is Test Driven Development?", in Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It, Greg Wilson Ed., O'Reilly, Cambridge, MA
Forrest Shull, Grigori Melnik, Burak Turhan, Lucas Layman, Madeline Diep and Hakan Erdogmus, "What do we know about Test-Driven Development?", IEEE Software, 27(6):16-19, November/December 2010.
[LWD06] Lucas Layman, Laurie Williams, Daniela Damian, and Hynek Bures "Essential Communication Practices for Extreme Programming in a Global Software Development Team," Information and Software Technology, vol. 48, issue 9, pp. 781-794, September 2006.
[Lay04] Lucas Layman, "Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Extreme Programming Practices on Software Projects," Companion to the 19th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA '04), Vancouver, Bc, October 24-28, 2004, pp. 328-329.
[LWC04a] Lucas Layman, Laurie Williams, and Lynn Cunningham, "Motivations and Measurements in an Agile Case Study," Journal of System Architecture, Vol. 52, Issue 11, 2006, pp. 654-667.
[LWC04b] Lucas Layman, Laurie Williams, and Lynn Cunningham, "Exploring Extreme Programming in Context: An Industrial Case Study," Proceedings of the 2nd Agile Development Conference (ADC '04), Salt Lake City, UT, June 22-26, 2004, pp. 32-41.
[WKL04] Laurie Williams, William Krebs, Lucas Layman, and Annie I. Antón, "Toward a Framework for Evaluating Extreme Programming," Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Empirical Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE '04), Edinburgh, Scotland, May 24-25, 2004, pp. 11-20.

Human Aspects of Software Development

My Ph.D. thesis research was on the topic of "Information Needs of Developers for Program Comprehension during Software Maintenance Tasks." During this research, I developed tools and performed user studies to understand how programmers search for information to inform their code changes. I have worked with Andy Begel to study inter- and intra-team coordination in a large scale, distributed software project, and performed the first study of distributed Extreme Programming at Tekelec. I am also involved in the Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering community.

[ANP09] Andrew Begel, Nachiappan Nagappan, Chrisopher Poile, Lucas Layman, "Coordination in Large-Scale Software Teams," Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Human and Cooperative Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE '09), pp. 1-7.
[LWS08] Lucas Layman, Laurie Williams, Robert St. Amant, "MimEc: Intelligent User Notification of Faults in the Eclipse IDE," Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Human and Cooperative Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE '08), pp. 73-76.
Best Paper Award!
[LWA07] Lucas Layman, Laurie Williams, Robert St. Amant, "Toward Reducing Fault Fix Time: Understanding Developer Behavior for the Design of Automated Fault Detection Tools," International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM '07), pp 176-185.

Last modified Tuesday, 14th August, 2012 @ 09:33pm