By: Guilherme Horta Travassos (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Abstract:
For a long time scientists have been committed to describe and organize information obtained by observations from the field. The ideas regarding experimentation have been explored and evolved into different scientific areas, including physics, agriculture, medicine, engineering and social sciences among others. We can observe similar behavior in Software Engineering. Software engineers have intensively worked to understand the application and evolution of software processes and technologies by applying the scientific method (experimentation) to support their researches. Nowadays, experimentation has demonstrated to be a need for the evolution of the field, representing a cardinal tool to allow the transference of software technologies to the industry; improve software processes and evidence behaviors in Software Engineering. The Experimental Software Engineering Group at COPPE/UFRJ (ese.cos.ufrj.br) promotes experimentation in the building of software technologies to the industry.
To make a software technology available to the industry demands three stages: its conception, construction and evaluation. Some approaches to construct and evaluate software technologies are easily found in the technical literature. However, this is not the case with the conception stage. This talk discuss an approach concerned with the conception, construction and evaluation of software technologies based on evidence collected through secondary and primary studies used by ESE group. The types of study (including quasi systematic reviews, surveys, quasi-experiments, action research and so on) and decision points are presented to allow its evaluation and application by software engineers. The discussion will be illustrated with concrete examples of technologies that have been developed following this approach.
Bio:
Guilherme Horta Travassos is a Professor of Software Engineering with the Systems Engineering and Computer Science Department at COPPE/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - Brazil. He is also a 1D CNPq - Brazilian Research Council researcher. He received his doctorate degree from COPPE/UFRJ in 1994 and spent 2 years with the Experimental Software Engineering Group at the University of Maryland - College Park, in a post-doctoral position (1998/2000). He leads the Experimental Software Engineering Group at COPPE/UFRJ. His current research interests include experimental software engineering, e-science and non-conventional Web applications, software quality, and VV&T concerned with object-oriented software. He is a member of ISERN, ACM, SBC (Brazilian Computer Society) and Information & Software Technology (Elsevier) editorial board.
Contact him at ght[at]cos.ufrj.br.