Bio and Research Interests
Peter C. Rigby is an associate professor in Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal. His overarching research interest is in understanding how developers collaborate to produce successful software systems. His research program is driven by a desire to determine empirically the factors that lead to the development of successful software and to adapt, apply, and validate these techniques in different settings. Empirical Software Engineering involves mining large data sets to provide an empirical basis for software engineering practices. Software Analytics is then used to provide statistical predictions of, for example, the areas of the system that would benefit from increased developer attention. Grounded, empirical findings are necessary to advance software development as an engineering discipline. He is currently focusing on the following research areas: software testing, developer turnover and knowledge loss, and code review. He has extensive industry collaboration with Ericsson and Meta.
Before becoming professor at Concordia, he was a postdoctoral researcher working with Martin Robillard at McGill University. He received his PhD from the University of Victoria with advisers Margaret-Anne Storey (The Chisel Group) and Daniel M. German. He was a visiting researcher with Prem Devanbu at UC Davis. He received a Bachelor degree at the University of Ottawa in Software Engineering.
Rigby introduced the PhD program in Software Engineering at Concordia University. As the Software Engineering undergraduate program director he was responsible for the CEAB accreditation and also lead an update of the curriculum. He has taught Software Maintenance, Human Computer Interaction, Software Architectures, Mining Software Repositories, and Modern Software Testing.
For more information or to apply to work in my research lab, please email me.
Publications
My top tier conference papers include 7 ICSE research track, 5 FSE research track, 8 FSE industry track, and 2 ICSE SEIP papers. I have received 2 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards (FSE and ICSME) and have won 1 Most Influential Paper Award at MSR.See my LinkedIn profile for recent announcements and my Google Scholar profile for the complete publication list. An incomplete list of my recent publications and pre-prints follows:
V Murali, C Maddila, I Ahmad, M Bolin, D Cheng, N Ghorbani, R Fernandez, N Nagappan, PC Rigby. (2024) AI-assisted Code Authoring at Scale: Fine-tuning, deploying, and mixed methods evaluations. Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE ’24)
Fallahzadeh E, Bavand A, Rigby PC. (2023). Accelerating Continuous Integration with Parallel Batch Testing. Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'23)
W Shackleton, K Cohn-Gordon, PC Rigby, R Abreu, J Gill, N Nagappan, K Nakad, I Papagiannis. (2023). Dead Code Removal at Meta: Automatically Deleting Millions of Lines of Code and Petabytes of Deprecated Data. Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'23-industry) Industry Track
A Mockus, PC Rigby, R Abreu, P Suresh, Y Chen, N Nagappan. (2023). Modeling the Centrality of Developer Output with Software Supply Chains. Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'23-industry)
Q Shan, D Sukhdeo, Q Huang, S Rogers, L Chen, E Paradis, PC Rigby, N Nagappan. (2022). Using nudges to accelerate code reviews at scale. Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'22), ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Y Chen, PC Rigby, Y Chen, K Jiang, N Dehghani, Q Huang, P Cottle, C Andrews, N Lee, N Nagappan. (2022). Workgraph: personal focus vs. interruption for engineers at Meta. Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'22-industry). paper
L Chen, R Abreu, T Akomolede, PC Rigby, S Chandra, N Nagappan. (2022). Leveraging test plan quality to improve code review efficacy. Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'22-industry)
Fallahzadeh E, Rigby PC. (2022). The Impact of Flaky Tests on Historical Test Prioritization on Chrome. International Conference on Software Engineering Industry Track (ICSE'22-SEIP)
L Chen, PC Rigby, N Nagappan. (2022). Understanding why we cannot model how long a code review will take: an industrial case study. Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'22-industry)
Beheshtian MJ, Bavand A, Rigby PC. (2021). Software Batch Testing to Save Build Test Resources and to Reduce Feedback Time. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE’21). paper
Bavand A, Rigby PC. (2021). Mining Historical Test Failures to Dynamically Batch Tests to Save CI Resources. International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME'21) paper
Rehman M, Rigby PC. (2021). Quantifying No-Fault-Found Test Failures to Prioritize Inspection of Flaky Tests at Ericsson. ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'21) Industry Track paper
Querel L-P, Rigby PC. (2021). Warning-Introducing Commits vs Bug-Introducing Commits: A tool, statistical models, and a preliminary user study. International Conference on Program Comprehension in the Replication and Negative results track (ICPC'21-RENE) paper, WarningsGuru tool, Replication package
"Do code review measures explain the incidence of post-release defects?" Krutauz, A., Dey, T., Rigby, P.C., Mockus, A., Empir Software Eng 25, 3323–3356 (EMSE'20). Presented as a journal first paper at FSE'20 paper
"Mitigating Turnover with Code Review Recommendation: Balancing Expertise, Workload, and Knowledge Distribution" Ehsan Mirsaeedi, Peter C. Rigby. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2020) paper, recorded talk, slides, GitHub app, Replication package
"Improving Bug Triaging with High Confidence Predictions at Ericsson" Aindrila Sarkar, Peter C. Rigby, Bela Bartalos ICSME'19, pdf, slides
"Bisecting Commits and Modeling Commit Risk during Testing." Armin Najafi, Peter C. Rigby, Weiyi Shang. Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE'19, pdf
"Natural Software Revisited" Musfiqur Rahman, Dharani Palani, Peter C. Rigby. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2019) pdf, slides
“Etiquette, Incompetence, Codes of Conduct on Open Source Software Projects” Peter C. Rigby. Keynote at OSS conference slides
"Improving Test Effectiveness Using Test Executions History: An Industrial Experience Report" Armin Najafi, Weiyi Shang, Peter C. Rigby. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE Industry Track 2019) pdf
"Mining Historical Test Logs to Predict Bugs and Localize Faults in the Test Logs" Anunay Amar, Peter C. Rigby. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2019) pdf, slides
"Cleaning StackOverflow for use in Machine Translation" Musfiqur Rahman, Dharani Palani, Peter C. Rigby, Tien Nguyen. Mining Software Repository (MSR data track 2019) pdf, slides
Rahman MT*, Rigby PC, Shihab E. (2018). The Modular and Feature Toggle Architectures of Google Chrome. Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) Presented as a journal first paper at FSE'18. pdf
Zhu Y*, Shihab E, Rigby PC. (2018). Test Re-prioritization in Continuous Testing Environments. The 34th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME'18) pdf, slides
Nguyen AT, Rigby PC, Nguyen T, Palani D*, Karanfil M*, Nguyen NT. (2018). Statistical Translation of English Texts to API Code Templates. The 34th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME'18) pdf
Rahman MT*, Rigby PC. (2018). The Impact of Failing, Flaky, and High Failure Tests on the number of Crash Reports associated with Firefox Builds. Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering ESEC/FSE 2018 (Industry Track) pdf
Querel LP*, Rigby PC. (2018). WarningsGuru: Integrating statistical bug models with static analysis to provide timely and specific bug warnings. Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering ESEC/FSE 2018 (Formal Demonstration Track) pdf
Top-tier Journal and Conference Publications
Shams Azad, Peter C. Rigby, and Latifa Guerrouj. Generating api call rules from version history and stack overflow posts. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. Selected to be presented as a journal first publication at ICSE’17 25, 4, Jan. 2017, 29:1–29:22 pdf
Peter C. Rigby, Yue Cai Zhu, Samuel Donadelli, and Audris Mockus. Quantifying and Mitigating Turnover-Induced Knowledge Loss: Case Studies of Chrome and a Project at Avaya. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Software Engineering, 2016, ICSE ’16. (Acceptance rate: 101/530 or 19%) pdf
Md Tajmilur Rahman, and Peter C. Rigby. Release stabilization on linux and chrome. Software, IEEE 32, 2, Mar 2015, 81–88 pdf
Peter C. Rigby, Daniel M. German, Laura Cowen, and Margaret-Anne Storey. Peer Review on Open-Source Software Projects: Parameters, Statistical Models, and Theory. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 23, 4, 2014, 35:1–35:33 pdf
Peter C. Rigby, and Christian Bird. Convergent contemporary software peer review practices. In Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering, 2013, ESEC/FSE 2013, ACM, pp. 202–212. (Acceptance rate: 51/251 or 20%) pdf
Peter C. Rigby, and Martin P. Robillard. Discovering Essential Code Elements in Informal Documentation. In Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering, 2013, ICSE ’13, IEEE Press, pp. 832–841. (Acceptance rate: 85/461 or 18.5%) pdf
Peter Rigby, Brendan Cleary, Frederic Painchaud, Margaret-Anne Storey, and Daniel German. Contemporary peer review in action: Lessons from open source development. IEEE Software 29, 6, Nov. 2012, 56–61. pdf
Peter C. Rigby, and Margaret-Anne Storey. Understanding broadcast based peer review on open source software projects. In Proceeding of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering, 2011, ICSE ’11, ACM, pp. 541–550. (Acceptance rate: 62/441 or 14%) pdf
Peter C. Rigby, Daniel M. German, and Margaret-Anne Storey. Open source software peer review practices: A case study of the apache server. In ICSE ’08: Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software engineering, 2008, ACM, pp. 541–550. (Acceptance rate: 56/371 or 15%) pdf of the extended TOSEM version
Other referred publications
Md Tajmilur Rahman, Louis Querel, Peter C. Rigby, and Bram Adams. Feature Toggles: A case study and survey. In Proceedings of the 13th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 2016, MSR ’16. (Acceptance rate: 36/103 or 27%) pdf
Latifa Guerrouj, David Bourque, and Peter C. Rigby. Leveraging Informal Documentation to Summarize Classes and Methods in Context. In 37th IEEE New Ideas Emerging Research track of the International Conference on Software Engineering, 2015, NIER ’15, IEEE Press. (Acceptance rate: 25/135 or 18%)
Samuel M. Donadelli, Yue Cai Zhou, and Peter C. Rigby. Organizational volatility and post-release defects: A replication case study using data from Google Chrome. In Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories , 2015
Latifa Guerrouj, Shams Azad, and Peter C. Rigby. The Influence of App Churn on App Success and StackOverflow Discussions. In 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering, 2015, SANER ’15, IEEE Press. (Acceptance rate: 46/144 or 32%)
Peter C. Rigby, Alberto Bacchelli, Georgios Gousios, and Murtuza Mukadam. A Mixed Methods Approach to Mining Code Review Data: Examples and a replication study of multi-commit reviews. In Analyzing Software Data, C. Bird, T. Menzies, and T. Zimmermann, Eds. Morgan Kaufmann, 2015.
Md Tajmilur Rahman, and Peter C. Rigby. Contrasting Development and Release Stabilization Work on the Linux Kernel. In International Workshop on Release Engineering 2014. pdf
Murtuza Mukadam, Christian Bird, and Peter C. Rigby. Gerrit software code review data from android. In Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 2013, MSR ’13, IEEE Press, pp. 45–48
Peter C. Rigby, Earl T Barr, Christian Bird, Prem Devanbu, and Daniel M German. What Effect does Distributed Version Control have on OSS Project Organization? In International Workshop on Release
Earl T. Barr, Christian Bird, Peter C. Rigby, Abram Hindle, Daniel M. German, and Premkumar Devanbu. Cohesive and isolated development with branches. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE’12), 2012
Christian Bird, Peter C. Rigby, Earl T. Barr, David J. Hamilton, Daniel M. German, and Prem Devanbu. The promises and perils of mining git. In MSR ’09: Proceedings of the 2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 2009, IEEE Computer Society, p. 10. (Acceptance rate: 14/47 or 30%)
Peter C. Rigby, and Ahmed E. Hassan. What can oss mailing lists tell us? a preliminary psychometric text analysis of the apache developer mailing list. In MSR ’07: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, 2007, IEEE Computer Society, p. 10. (Acceptance rate: 15/39 or 38%)
Daniel M. German, Peter C. Rigby, and Margaret-Anne Storey. Using evolutionary annotations from change logs to enhance program comprehension. In MSR ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2006, ACM Press, pp. 159–162
Margaret-Anne Storey, Li-Te Cheng, Ian Bull, and Peter Rigby. Shared waypoints and social tagging to support collaboration in software development. In CSCW ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, 2006, ACM Press, pp. 195–198
Margaret-Anne Storey, Li-Te Cheng, Ian Bull, and Peter Rigby. Waypointing and social tagging to support program navigation. In CHI ’06: CHI ’06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2006, ACM Press, pp. 1367–1372
Peter C. Rigby, Davor Čubranić, Suzanne Thompson, Daniel M. German, and Margaret-Anne Storey. The challenges of creating open source educational software: the Gild experience. In Open Educational Symposium of the 1st International Conference on Open Source Systems, 2005, pp. 338–340
Peter C. Rigby, and Suzanne Thompson. Study of novice programmers using Eclipse and Gild. In eclipse ’05: Proceedings of the 2005 OOPSLA workshop on Eclipse technology eXchange, 2005, ACM Press, pp. 105–109
Dissertation
Peter C. Rigby. Understanding Open Source Software Peer Review: Review Processes, Parameters and Statistical Models, and Underlying Behaviours and Mechanisms. Rigby2011Dissertation.pdf, Dissertation, 2011
Technical Reports
Peter C. Rigby, and Daniel M. German. A preliminary examination of code review processes in open source projects. Tech. Rep. DCS-305-IR, University of Victoria, January 2006
Peter C. Rigby, and Eric G. Manning. Network congestion control mechanism based on the minimum bid in randomized auctions. Tech. rep., University of Victoria, December 2005
Peter C. Rigby, and Daniel M. German. Towards the Characterization of Open Source Projects: A Framework and its Application. Tech. rep., University of Victoria, December 2005