Keynotes:


Claes Wohlin
is a professor of software engineering at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Are Systematic Literature Studies Trustworthy and Useful for Research and Practice?
Systematic literature reviews and systematic mapping studies have become common in software engineering. These types of studies are secondary studies, i.e. they build on research studies conducted by others. However, secondary studies come with challenges. Thus, it becomes more and more important to better capture lessons-learned from conducting such studies and to understand the reliability of them. At the end, a researcher would like to know whether a secondary study is trustworthy and capture the research gap in an area. From an industrial point of view, a practitioner may want to know if a secondary study is useful for taking a business decision. The keynote presents experiences from conducting secondary studies and some reflections on literature on the subject. It is concluded that secondary studies are important, but their reliability cannot simply be taken for granted. The presentation is concluded with some pointers to further research needed to make secondary studies even more valuable to both researchers and practitioners.
Professor Wohlin has previously held professor chairs at the universities in Lund and Linköping in Sweden. His research interests include empirical methods in software engineering, software metrics, software quality, requirements engineering, and global software engineering. Claes Wohlin received a PhD in Communication Systems from Lund University in 1991.He is Editor-in-Chief of Information and Software Technology and member of the editorial boards of Software Quality Journal and Requirements Engineering Journal. He has published more than 200 papers internationally in software engineering; he is the principal author of the book Experimentation in Software Engineering published by Springer in 2012, which is based on the first version of the book published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000. Claes Wohlin was the recipient of the Telenor Nordic Research Prize in 2004 for his achievements in software engineering and improvement of reliability for telecommunication systems. In 2011, he was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Contact him at Claes.Wohlin@bth.se or visit his website at www.wohlin.eu.
Steve Easterbrook
is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Software Teams As Knowledge Communities
Software development is an uncertain process, in which it's often impossible to know in advance what solutions will be acceptable to customers and users. Hence, software development is usually an iterative process, in which the software team gains a deeper understanding of the nature of the requirements with each iteration of the design process. This is particularly true of computational science, in which simulation models are built to explore the consequences of hypotheses, where direct experiment or calculation of results is not possible. However, the construction of computational models differs in a number of important ways from conventional software - the scientists who build the software have deep domain expertise, but are not trained as software developers, they tend to build the software for their own use, rather than for other users, and, in many cases, code development is not formally part of their job description. In my studies of how computational scientists build their models, I've been struck by how they weave software development into the scientific process - each new variant of the code is a new experimental treatment, built to test a specific (but often unstated) hypothesis, and software testing is run like a scientific investigation. In this talk, I'll explain these distinguishing traits of scientific software development. I'll go on to argue that these differences shed an interesting perspective on software development in general, and pose some challenges for empirical studies of software practices. In particular, I will argue that we focus too much on the interactions between developers and technical artefacts they work with, and not enough on how software teams operate as knowledge communities, and in particular the question of how they accumulate and share their understanding of the problem domain. I will illustrate these ideas throughout the talk with examples drawn from a multi-year multi-site ethnographic study of how climate scientists build the earth system models that shape our detailed understanding of the climate system and provide projections of future climate change.
Professor Easterbrook received his Ph.D. (1991) in Computing from Imperial College in London (UK), and was a lecturer at the School of Cognitive and Computing Science, University of Sussex from 1990 to 1995. In 1995 he moved to the US to lead the research team at NASA´s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in West Virginia, where he investigated software verification on the Space Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, the Earth Observation System, and several planetary probes. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1999. His research interests range from modelling and analysis of complex systems to the socio-cognitive aspects of team interaction; in the last five years he has focussed his research on the software and communication tools used for understanding and explaining climate change. He has served on the program committees for many conferences and workshops in Requirements Engineering and Software Engineering, and was general chair for RE'01 and program chair for ASE'06. In the summer of 2008, he was a visiting scientist at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, and in 2010 a visiting scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; the Max-Planck- Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, and the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris.
Publisher:
In cooperation with:
Organizing and Sponsors:
Cin UFPE   Citi   Capes   Cesar   Cnpq   Facepe   Ines
Developed by: