The Science of Software Engineering

ABSTRACT

Software is everywhere. If software were to stop working tomorrow, very few people in the world would be unaffected. There would be significant loss of life, either immediately when medical devices stop working, or in longer term when the world's (transport systems) collapse, meaning vital equipment and even more vital food cannot be delivered. And despite claims made multiple times over the decades that all the software we would ever need has been written, the rate of creation of new software continues to increase. This suggests that software is very important, and so it would seem reasonable to study its development and evolution, to understand everything that could be understood about software. This talk will take a peek through a scientific-like lens into a small part of our attempts to understand software.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ewan Tempero graduated from the University of Otago, New Zealand, with a B.Sc. (Honours) in Mathematics in 1983 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, USA, in 1990. He was then appointed as Lecturer, and later Senior Lecturer, in Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington. He joined the University of Auckland as an Associate Professor in Computer Science in 2002.
Ewan is interested in all aspects of creation of software products. His main research is investigating how to reliably and objectively assess the quality of software designs. Poor design choices usually lead to higher total cost of ownership of the software product, usually in terms of higher costs for making future changes. Identifying poor choices, or even better, avoiding making them in the first place, would reduce costs and improve productivity. Ewan uses code analysis techniques to identify what design choices developers have made and uses this to understand what the consequences of those choices are. He also uses empirical study techniques such as surveys and interviews to determine how developers made design decisions. To support his research Ewan has created the Qualitas Corpus, a curated collection of open-source Java systems that is used for by researchers around the world. Outside his academic life, Ewan practises Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karate.

Host or Publisher Faculty of Science, University of Auckland