Publications
While I was doing my Ph.D., my research focused on developer documentation: I used qualitative methods to better understand how this kind of documentation is created, maintained, and used, and I developed tools to support open source contributors in improving the documentation of their project.
During my “research career”, I also studied how to analyze partial programs, how to automatically adapt client programs when frameworks evolve, and how to better support developers in efficiently creating framework documentation.
Two topics were particularly influential in my career:
Developer Documentation
Developer documentation helps developers learn frameworks and libraries. To better understand how documentation in open source projects is created and maintained, we performed a qualitative study in which we interviewed core contributors who wrote developer documentation and developers who read documentation. In addition, we studied the evolution of 19 documents by analyzing more than 1500 document revisions. We identified the decisions that contributors make, the factors influencing these decisions and the consequences for the project. Among many findings, we observed how working on the documentation could improve the code quality and how constant interaction with the projects’ community positively impacted the documentation.
The paper presenting the results of our study was published at FSE 2010.
Project Landscape
When developers join a software development project, they find themselves in a project landscape, and they must become familiar with the various landscape features. To better understand the nature of project landscapes and the integration process, with a view to improving the experience of both newcomers and the people responsible for orienting them, we performed a grounded theory study with 18 newcomers across 18 projects. We identified the main features that characterize a project landscape, together with key orientation aids and obstacles, and we theorize that there are three primary factors that impact the integration experience of newcomers: early experimentation, internalizing structures and cultures, and progress validation.
Learn more about project integration and the project landscape metaphor by reading our ICSE 2010 technical paper.
Published Papers and Theses
2015
Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard, and Barthélémy Dagenais. Extracting Development Tasks to Navigate Software Documentation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 41(6):565-581, June 2015.
2014
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Using Traceability Links to Recommend Adaptive Changes for Documentation Evolution. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 40(11):1126-1146, November 2014. pdf
2012
Barthélémy Dagenais. Analysis and Recommendations for Developer Learning Resources. Ph.D. thesis. McGill University, 2012. pdf
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Recovering Traceability Links between an API and its Learning Resources. In Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 47-57, June 2012.
Gias Uddin, Barthélémy Dagenais, and Martin P. Robillard. Temporal Analysis of API Usage Concepts. In Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 804-814, June 2012.
2011
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Recommending Adaptive Changes for Framework Evolution. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 20(4), 2011. pdf
2010
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Creating and Evolving Developer Documentation: Understanding the Decisions of Open Source Contributors. To appear in the Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 127-136, November 2010. [ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper] pdf
Barthélémy Dagenais, Harold Ossher, Rachel K.E. Bellamy, Martin P. Robillard, and Jacqueline P. de Vries. Moving into a New Software Project Landscape. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 275-284, May 2010. pdf
Martin P. Robillard and Barthélémy Dagenais. Recommending Change Clusters to Support Software Investigation: An Empirical Study. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, 22(3):143-164, April 2010.
2009
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. SemDiff: Analysis and Recommendation Support for API Evolution. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, Formal Research Demonstration, pages 599-602, May 2009.
Barthélémy Dagenais, Harold Ossher, Rachel K. E. Bellamy, Martin P. Robillard, and Jacqueline P. de Vries. A Qualitative Study on Project Landscapes. In Procceedings of the Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, an ICSE workshop, pages 32-35, May 2009.
2008
Barthélémy Dagenais. Recommending Adaptive Changes for Framework Evolution. Master’s thesis. McGill University, 2008. [Dean's honour list] pdf
Barthélémy Dagenais and Harold Ossher. Automatically Locating Framework Extension Examples. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 203-213, November 2008.
Martin P. Robillard and Barthélémy Dagenais. Retrieving Task-Related Clusters from Change History. In Proceedings of the 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, pages 17-26, October 2008.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Laurie Hendren. Enabling Static Analysis for Partial Java Programs. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems and Applications, pages 313-328, October 2008.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Recommending Adaptive Changes for Framework Evolution. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 481-490, May 2008. [ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper] pdf
2007
Barthélémy Dagenais, Silvia Breu, Frédéric Weigand Warr and Martin P. Robillard. Inferring Structural Patterns for Concern Traceability in Evolving Software. In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 254-263, November 2007.
Barthélémy Dagenais. Partial Program Analysis. Sable Technical Report 2007-06. September 2007.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Harold Ossher. Mismar: a new approach to developer documentation. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’07 Companion), pages 47-48, May 2007.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Harold Ossher. Aiding Evolution with Concern-Oriented Guides. In Proceedings of the Linking Aspect Technology and Evolution (LATE) at AOSD, March 2007.
2006
Barthélémy Dagenais and Harold Ossher. Guidance Through Active Concerns. In Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology Exchange (ETX) at OOPSLA, pages 60-64, October 2006.
Works of Fiction
These are works of fiction that I wrote in French. They were grounded in my reality at the time I wrote them. A harsh critic would say that these stories were naive and full of stereotypes, but whenever I feel old, I read them and feel young again :-)
Un Noël à Hochelaga
Léonard, 9 ans, vit avec ses parents dans un petit appartement du quartier Hochelaga à Montréal. À quelques jours de Noël, Loto-Québec lance une nouvelle loterie qui bouleverse non seulement les clients du bar Chez Yves, mais aussi tout l’univers de la petite famille de la rue Nicolet. Suivez Léonard dans ses aventures à Hochelaga et retrouvez l’abbé Amadeus Noël, prêteur sur gages, Cindy, femme désagréable au passé troublant, et l’ineffable Stephen Harp, réparateur de Loto-Québec.