In order to increase our ability to use measurement to support software development practise we need to do more analysis of code. However, empirical studies of code are expensive and their results are difficult to compare. We describe the Qualitas Corpus, a large curated collection of open source Java systems. The corpus reduces the cost of performing large empirical studies of code and supports comparison of measurements of the same artifacts. We discuss its design, organisation, and issues associated with its development.

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Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15%). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.

Head-Mounted Virtual reality (VR) systems provide full-immersive experiences to users and completely isolate them from the outside world, placing them in unsafe situations. Existing research proposed different alert-based solutions to address this. Our work builds on these studies on notification systems for VR environments from a different perspective. We focus on: (i) exploring alert systems to notify VR users about non-immersed bystanders' in socially related, non-critical interaction contexts; (ii) understanding how best to provide awareness of non-immersed bystanders while maintaining presence and immersion within the Virtual Environment(VE). To this end, we developed single and combined alert cues -leveraging proxemics, perception channels, and push/pull approaches and evaluated those via two user studies. Our findings indicate a strong preference towards maintaining immersion and combining audio and visual cues, push and pull notification techniques that evolve dynamically based on proximity.

As teams and organisations make the difficult shift to agile ways of working, there has been relatively little investigation of how they adopt and use agile practices. To aid those teams looking to move to agile we should examine how others have done so and what practical value they found. We studied teams which adopted agile practices across a spectrum from taking on a whole methodology to a couple of practices at a time, and then committed to continuous assessment and improvement of their ways of working. Those teams favoured adapting agile-based, team-oriented practices suited to their particular needs over technical practices and defined methodologies.