A (Short) Exercise in Reproduction

At VISSOFT 2019, Christian Collberg and coauthors received a Most Influential Paper Award for their 2003 article “A System for Graph-Based Visualization of the Evolution of Software”. In the acceptance address, “A (Short) Exercise in Reproduction”, Christian describes the difficulties he encountered in trying to rebuild the now fifteen-year-old software to match what was used for the original article and suggests how he and Computer Science in general can do better. Slides are here: materials.

Written by Keith Alcock