Abstract: Plenty of effort goes into producing an MSR paper. Of course, the argumentation, execution, evaluation, and presentation need to be “on point”. Contributions need to be timely and substantial. In this talk, I will not discuss any of this. Instead, I will reflect on a personal journey that happened to produce an MSR 2014 paper. By tracing the idea from its initial seeds to its appearance in the published version, I will strive to provide insights for the community to reflect upon as we set out to foster a new generation of MSR researchers.

Bio: Dr. Shane McIntosh is the current Ross & Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellow and an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada. At U. Waterloo, Dr. McIntosh leads the Software Repository Excavation and Build Engineering Labs (Software REBELs), whose mission is to enabled the development, maintenance, and operation of intelligent release pipelines. As such, his research interests include software build automation, continuous integration, DevOps, software quality, and of course, mining software repositories.

At the University of Waterloo, I lead the Software Repository Excavation and Build Engineering Labs (the Software REBELs). Broadly speaking, my students and I perform empirical studies that mine the historical data that is generated during the development of large-scale software systems. Specifically, my research focuses on release engineering (i.e., the process of assembling, verifying, and delivering releases of software systems from its sources) and software quality (i.e., deriving practical guidelines for developing more reliable software systems).