Attending LASER 2010

Today I managed to go through my notes of the 2010 edition of the LASER summerschool series. While doing this I realized that, apart from the fancy hotel, the good food, the nice people and the great weather, the trip also had a high educational value!
  • Walter Tichy explained several important aspects, which I need to take into account while designing my next empirical study.
  • In addition, Natalia Juristo pointed out several things I will keep in mind during this design in order to make sure others can repeat it.
  • Tim Menzies gave a very good introduction into the ins and outs of data-mining (in such a way I actually want to try it out)
  • Bertrand Meyer (and his students) made me aware of some testing techniques I forgot about.
  • The presentation of Joshua Bloch was, for me, less relevant from a PhD point-of-view, but his thoughts about good API design are extremely interesting from a developers point of view.
  • It was really fun (and interesting) to hear Barry Boehm explain his research on estimation models and how empirical SE can be integrated into education.
  • Last but not least, the presentations of Victor Basili contained a lot of stuff which I believe is relevant for what we are doing at SIG.
Now, all we have to do is to figure out how we can free up some time to apply all that we learned :)

A magazine article

This week I received some hard-copies of the July/August issue of the IEEE Software magazine. This issue contains an article called
A Lightweight Sanity Check for Implemented Architectures
which is written by Arie van Deursen and yours truly.

The article looks really great, it has multiple colours, pull-quotes, a side-bar and pictures! And although good looks are sometimes deceiving, this article also contains some pretty interesting content (if I do say so myself).

As expected, it describes a check-list which can be used to get a quick overview of the state of the implemented architecture of a system. Such an overview helps in determining which parts of the architecture can be improved, or confirms that everything is in good shape. I believe that both outcomes are interesting, so I recommend everybody to give LiSCIA a try!