Elaine Weyuker: Empirical Software Engineering Research - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The Software Engineering Research community has slowly recognized that empirical studies are an important way of validating ideas and increasingly our community has stopped accepting the sufficiency of arguing that a smart person has come up with the idea and therefore it must be good. This has led to a flood of empirical software engineering papers. However, not all empirical studies are created equal, and many may not even provide any useful information or value. In this talk I consider the good, the bad, and the ugly. What are we as a community doing correctly? What are we doing less well than we should be because we either don't have the necessary artifacts or the time and resources required to do "the good" is perceived to be too great? And where are we missing the boat entirely in terms of not addressing critical questions and often not even recognizing that these questions are central even if we don't know the answers.

Biography

Elaine Weyuker is an AT&T Fellow doing software engineering research. Prior to moving to AT&T she was a professor of computer science at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Her research interests currently focus on software fault prediction, software testing, and software metrics and measurement. In an earlier life, Elaine did research in Theory of Computation and is the co-author of a book "Computability, Complexity, and Languages" with Martin Davis and Ron Sigal.

Elaine is the recipient of the 2010 ACM President's Award, the ACM SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Paper Awards in 2009, the 2008 Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award and 2007 ACM/SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award. She is also a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, and an ACM Fellow and has received IEEE's Harlan Mills Award for outstanding software engineering research, Rutgers University 50th Anniversary Outstanding Alumni Award, and the AT&T Chairman's Diversity Award as well has having been named a Woman of Achievement by the YWCA. She is the chair of the ACM Women's Council (ACM-W) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Coalition to Diversify Computing.

Jan Bosch: Driving Innovation through Software Experiment Systems

Peter Drucker, the management guru, once famously said that companies need to do two things well: marketing and innovation. Everything else is cost and can be outsourced. For software intensive industries, this is obviously as true as for any other industry. In most organizations, software R&D focuses on efficiency, but our research shows that the focus really should be on innovation as a means to drive revenue growth. Modern innovation approaches require mechanisms to continuously collect customer feedback. We refer to the set of mechanisms that software R&D uses to involve customers as an "experiment system". The presentation presents the key challenges surrounding innovation in software, presents the concept of experiment systems and then discusses several industrial cases.

Biography

Jan Bosch is VP, Engineering Process at Intuit Inc where he also leads Intuit's Open Innovation efforts and heads the central mobile technologies team. Earlier, he was head of the Software and Application Technologies Laboratory at Nokia Research Center, Finland. Before joining Nokia, he headed the software engineering research group at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he holds a professorship in software engineering. He received a MSc degree from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree from Lund University, Sweden. His research activities include compositional software engineering, software architecture design, software product families and software variability management. He is the author of a book "Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach" published by Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley & ACM Press), (co-)editor of several books and volumes in, among others, the Springer LNCS series and (co-)author of a significant number of research articles. He is editor for Science of Computer Programming, has been guest editor for journal issues, chaired several conferences as general and program chair, served on many program committees and organized numerous workshops.

As a consultant, as a professor and as an employee, Jan has worked with and for many companies on strategic reuse in general and software product lines specifically, including Philips, Thales Naval Netherlands, Robert Bosch GmbH, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, Tellabs, Avaya, Tieto Enator and Det Norska Veritas. Around software product lines, he has published on, advised and implemented specific techniques and methods around, among others, software architecture, software variability management, the link to business strategy, organizational models, assessment frameworks, adoption frameworks and quality attributes. More information about his background can be found at his website: www.janbosch.com. When not working, Jan divides his time between his family, a spouse and three young boys, reading science fiction and sports, preferably long distance running, swimming, biking and horseback riding.