Failure is a Four-Letter Word
A Parody in Empirical Research
Saarland University – Computer Science
Campus E1 1
66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
E-mail: zeller @ cs.uni-saarland.de
Phone: +49 681 302-70970
The infamous IROP principle
This site holds resources for the paper Failure is a Four-Letter Word - A Parody in Empirical Research, in which Andreas Zeller (Saarland University), Thomas Zimmermann (Microsoft) and Christian Bird (Microsoft) found that the letters I, R, O, P correlated with a high defect rate in Eclipse 3.0. Consequently, they suggested to avoid them in the future, including removing them from keyboards.
The paper is a "parody in empirical research", replicating a number of blunders that the authors have found in papers of researchers. Besides (hopefully) being fun to read, the authors hope it will be most useful in classroom usage.
The paper
The paper is availableThe presentation
- PROMISE 2011 presentation (Slides, audio, and question/answer session)
- Video of practice talk at Microsoft Research (coming soon!)
- Presentation slides in PDF
Scripts and data
- The scripts and data used for this research are available, too.