Keynote Speakers

Keynote speakers will include:

Title

Decentralized software development: pitfalls and challenges

Abstract:

The talk discusses different three main threads through which monolithic and centralized software development became increasingly distributed and decentralized. One is off-shoring, in which geographically distributed teams cooperate in the development of an application. Another is component-based software development, in which two separate development cycles interact: development of component and development of the composite. A third thread is software-as-service, in which the two main stakeholders (service provider and the service client) continue to interact at run time. Each of these threads has its own potential advantages over traditional software development, but also raises fundamental concerns. The talk discusses how they stress some of the conceptually difficult aspects of software development and how they introduce new problems and difficulties that did not exist before.

Short biography:

Carlo Ghezzi is a Professor and Chair of Software Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. He is the RectorÕs Delegate for research. In the past, he has been a member of the Academic Senate and a Member of the Board of Governors of Politecnico. He also held positions as Department Chair, Head of the PhD Program and Head of Òconsiglio di corso di laureaÓ. He has also been affiliated with: Universitˆ di Padova, University of California at Los Angeles, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of California at Santa Barbara (USA), Escuela Superior Latino-Americana de Informatica (Argentina), Technical University of Vienna and University of Klagenfurt (Austria), University of Lugano (Switzerland).

He is a Fellow of the ACM (citation: Numerous research contributions from compiler theory to real-time systems to software processes. A strong contributor to the software engineering community in Europe and worldwide.) and Fellow of the IEEE (citation: Contributions to programming languages and software engineering). He was awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award. He is a member of the Academy of Sciences. He has been a member of several governmental committees and was the Italian representative in the EU Information Technology Committee (Esprit Programme) during the 4th Framework Programme. He has been on the board of several international research projects and institutions in Europe, Japan, and the USA.

He is a regular member of the program committee of flagship conferences of the software engineering field, such as the International Conference on Software Engineering and Foundations of Software Engineering/ European Software Engineering Conference, for which he also served as Program and General Chair. He has been General Chair of the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2006, Chicago, USA). He has been the Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He is currently an Associate Editor of Science of Computer Programming (Elsevier), Service Oriented Computing and Applications (Springer), and Software Process Improvement and Practice (J. Wiley and Sons).

Carlo Ghezzi's research has been focusing on different aspects of software engineering and programming languages. Currently, he is active in the area of software architectures, especially evolvable and distributed software architectures for ubiquitous and pervasive computer applications. He co-authored over 150 papers, almost all of which are published internationally, and 8 books. He coordinated several national and international (EU funded) research projects. He has been a recipient of an ERC Advanced Research Grant in 2008.

Title

An Empiricist View of Managing Globally Distributed Software Development

Abstract:

Software Engineering research is still catching up with the explosive growth in the adoption and proliferation of distributed software development in its many forms. In this talk, I will present the research roadmap I, as an empirical researcher, had taken to investigate distributed software development, and will highlight the key findings and inferences from my exploration. Drawing evidence from more than two hundred large scale distributed software development projects that I had observed in the past five years, I will discuss the challenges faced by distributed software teams along with the way these teams (and their organizations) have responded to the challenges. I will also share my views on the existing gaps, both theoretical and empirical, in software engineering economics literature that need to be bridged to further our understanding of distributed software development. These gaps specifically relate to how software engineering researchers and practitioners accommodate ÒdistributednessÓ in project planning, execution, control and reflection activities. Overall, my discussions will call for a new set of governance schemes specifically suited for distributed software development projects, and will lay out a roadmap for empirical software engineers to build one.

Short biography:

Narayan Ramasubbu is an assistant professor at the School of Information Systems at the Singapore Management University. He has a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering degree from Bharathiyar University, India. Prior to pursuing the Ph.D., he was a senior developer and product management specialist, first at CGI Inc. and then at SAP AG. His research focuses on software engineering economics, distributed software product development, and software product standardization and customization. His research statement and projects can be viewed here