ESEM Best Paper Award

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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