Colloquium Details
Inside Software Engineering: The Dynamics of Industrial Software Engineering Research
| Author: | David M. Weiss Avaya Labs Research |
|---|---|
| Date: | May 14, 2009 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes Hall, University of Oregon |
| Host: | Michal Young |
Abstract
In an industrial environment where software development is a necessary part of product development, measuring the state of software development and the attributes of the software becomes a crucial issue. For a company to survive and to make progress against its competition, it must have answers to questions such as "What is my customers' perception of the quality of the software in my products?", "How long will it take me to complete a new product or a new release of an existing one?" "What are the major bottlenecks in software production?" "How effective is a new technique or tool when introduced into the software development process?" The fate of the company, and of individuals within the company, may depend on accurate answers to these questions, so one must not only know how to obtain and analyze data to answer them, but also estimate how good one's answers are.
In a large scale industrial software development environment, software measurement must be meaningful, automatable, nonintrusive, and feasible. Sources of data are diffuse, nonuniform, and nonstandard. The data itself are difficult to collect and interpret, and hard to compare across projects and organizations. The data are also very valuable in that they may drive software engineering research aimed at improving the organization's software development practices, and showing the effects of introducing new software engineering ideas and technology into the development environment.
In this talk I will discuss the challenges of deciding what questions to ask, how to answer them, and what the impact of answering them is. I will illustrate with examples drawn from real projects, focusing on change data and how we use it to answer some of the questions posed in the preceding.
Biography
David M. Weiss received the B.S. degree in Mathematics in 1964 from Union College, and the M.S. in Computer Science in 1974 and the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981 from the University of Maryland. He is currently the head of the Software Technology Research Department at Avaya Laboratories, and is looking into the problem of how to improve the effectiveness of software development in general and of Avaya's software development processes in particular. In this capacity he heads the Avaya Resource Center for Software Technology.
Previously he was the Director of the Software Production Research Department at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories, which conducted research on how to improve the effectiveness of software development. Before joining Bell Labs, he was Director of the Reuse and Measurement Department of the Software Productivity Consortium (SPC), a consortium of 14 large U.S. aerospace companies. Prior to joining SPC Dr. Weiss spent a year at the Office of Technology Assessment, where he was co-author of a technology assessment of the Strategic Defense Initiative. During the 1985-1986 academic year he was a visiting scholar at The Wang Institute and for many years was a researcher at the Computer Science and Systems Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in Washington, D.C. He has also worked as a programmer and as a mathematician.
Dr. Weiss's principal research interests are in the area of software engineering, particularly in software development processes and methodologies, software design, and software measurement. His best known work is the invention of the goal-question-metric approach to software measurement, his work on the modular structure of software systems, and his work in software product-line engineering as a co-inventor of the Synthesis process, and its successor the FAST process. He is co-author and co-editor of two books: Software Product Line Engineering and Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers of David L. Parnas.