Mark Sherriff

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Software engineering, software reliability, compute science education, mobile computing, agile software development, and extreme programming.

Mark Sherriff received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2007. He recently worked as a software engineer at IBM, performing research in guiding verification and validation efforts. As a grad student at NC State, Mark served in the Computer Science department as an Adjunct Lecturer and was recognized by the University as a Dean's Fellow and as an Outstanding Teaching Assistant. Prior to entering graduate school, he was the Chief Programmer at a student-run web development start-up called Knowledge2Work. He has served on the organizing committees of the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering and the IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training. His teaching interests include software engineering and database management.

Sherriff's research interests are in empirical software engineering and computer science education. His recent work has focused on using singular value decomposition with software development artifacts to highlight relationships within software systems. These relationships are based upon empirical records of system development and maintenance and can describe the evolution of the software system. When these relationships are coupled with verification and validation techniques such as static analysis or regression testing, maintenance and testing efforts can be directed based upon historical evidence of where previous faults have occurred. He also developed the Defect Estimation with Verification and Validation (V&V) Certificates on Programming (DevCOP) system for creating a persistent record of V&V practices as certificates, which can then be referenced later during the development and maintenance of the system.

• "Prioritization of Regression Tests using Singular Value Decomposition with Empirical Change Records", M. Sherriff, J. M. Lake, and L. Williams, International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, Trollhattan, Sweeden, 2007.
• "Using Groupings of Static Analysis Alerts to Identify Files Likely to Contain Field Failures", M. Sherriff, S. S. Heckman, J. M. Lake, and L. Williams, Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2007.
• "Identifying Fault-Prone Files Using Static Analysis Alerts Through Singular Value Decomposition", M. Sherriff, S. S. Heckman, J. M. Lake, and L. Williams, International Conference of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies, Richmond Hill, Ontario, 2007.
• "DevCOP: A Software Certificate Management System for Eclipse", M. Sherriff and L. Williams, International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2006, pp. 375-384.
• "A Method for Verification and Validation Certificate Management in Eclipse", M. Sherriff and L. Williams, Workshop on Software Certificate Management, Long Beach, California, 2005, pp. 19-22.