ESEM Best Paper Award

UBC Computer Science Professor Ivan Beschastnikh, together with ECE graduate student Keheliya Gallaba and ECE Professor  Ali Mesbah, won the Best Full Paper Award at the 9th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2015).

Callbacks are a popular language features in JavaScript. However, they are also a source of comprehension and maintainability issues (see image). The paper studied several features of callback usage across a large number of JS applications. One major finding is that over 43% of all callback-accepting function callsites are anonymous, the majority of callbacks are nested, and more than half of all callbacks are invoked asynchronously.  To learn more about this study see this website