Category Archives: Academia

Empirical Software Engineering at American Scientist

Posted on October 19, 2011 by

(Crossposted from Never Work in Theory.) A feature article on recent developments on empirical software engineering, by Greg Wilson and myself, has just been published in the November-December issue of American Scientist. Electronic version available here. Thanks to Morgan Ryan, our editor … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Software development | Leave a comment

The IROP paper

Posted on October 11, 2011 by

If you keep track of recent developments in empirical software engineering, you may have already heard of the fantastic IROP study. I was too busy writing a paper to blog about it when Andreas Zeller presented it at PROMISE 2011, … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Software development | 6 Comments

Greg Wilson at the University of Victoria

Posted on July 6, 2011 by

Greg Wilson, editor of Beautiful Code, Making Software, and the Architecture of Open Source Applications, author of several other books, creator of the Software Carpentry project, and all-around great guy, will be giving a presentation at the University of Victoria … Continue reading →

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Announcing “It will never work in theory”

Posted on June 28, 2011 by

As you may know, a few colleagues and I have been trying to find ways to close the gap between software development research and practice. We believe that in recent years there has been much research that practitioners would find … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Community, Software development | Leave a comment

ICSE 2011 Panel – slides and recap

Posted on June 8, 2011 by

(Updated August 7th to include David Weiss’ slides) Here are the slides from the four participants of our “What Industry Wants from Research” ICSE 2011 panel that gave us their permission to share them. Lionel Briand: Peri Tarr: Tatsuhiro Nishioka: … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Software development | 8 Comments

How do practitioners perceive software engineering research?

Posted on May 19, 2011 by

(Note: this is cross-posted at Margaret-Anne Storey’s blog and at Greg Wilson’s blog, but please post your thoughts here, on my blog. This post is based on the work of its coauthors, Jorge Aranda and Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey, as well … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Software development | 31 Comments

Naur’s “Programming as Theory Building”

Posted on April 19, 2011 by

A critique from Alistair Cockburn on how the agile movement is under attack from Taylorism led me to an essay by Dave West on the philosophical incompatibilities between lean and agile techniques, and this in turn led me to finally … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Conceptual Models, Philosophy, Software development | 12 Comments

Nature – Climate Change

Posted on March 31, 2011 by

There is a new journal from Nature on topics (physical and social) surrounding climate change. In the first issue, Kurt Kleiner has a pretty good essay on open data and open climate software. Among his interviewees are Steve Easterbrook and … Continue reading →

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Then a Miracle Occurs?

Posted on March 2, 2011 by

I think one of the reasons that make many people uncomfortable with qualitative research lies in the difficulty of doing data analysis properly. You prepare a study design with carefully worded research questions, you have a bunch of interview guides, … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia | 4 Comments

Like learning Old Norse

Posted on February 23, 2011 by

Since I’m doing fieldwork at a software organization these days, I have very present in my mind the difficulty of getting my bearings in a new environment. Several researchers have reported of these difficulties in the case of newcomers to … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Software development | 2 Comments