Software Reuse: is Research Delivering for Industry?

  • Moderator: Martin Griss, Ph.D., Director
    Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley
    martin.griss@sv.cmu.edu


  • Juan Llorens, Ph.D., Professor & CTO,
    Informatics Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
    & CTO, The Reuse Company
    juan.llorens@uc3m.es


  • William B. Frakes, Ph.D., Associate Professor (retired),
    Computer Science Department, Virginia Tech

  • Ted J. Biggerstaff, Ph.D., Principal
    Software Generators, LLC, Austin, Texas
     tbiggerstaff@austin.rr.com

  • Tullio Vardanega, Ph.D. Associate Professor,
    Department of Mathematics,
    University of Padua, Italy


Abstract:

Generally, industry is receptive to practical, bottom-up incremental improvements of their current software development and reuse practices, and have a hard time accepting new or “revolutionary” technologies. On the other hand, most academic researchers need to invent and publish “novel” technologies, and feel they get limited respect for case studies or detailed analysis of the effectiveness of methods.

As a consequence, many view reuse as not an exciting and “sexy” area, when compared to more recently flashy activities such as cloud computing, big data, social media, internet of things and agile development.

For example in the area of Software Product Lines, industry typically is not able to absorb proactive, domain engineered approaches, and prefers incremental, reactive approaches. How can we improve the uptake of new technologies? Is it in the way we describe them, or do researchers need to spend more time on understanding what can be adopted?

In order to make progress on the question "What does Industry need from reuse researchers” the panel will explore in detail the complementary questions:

  • What must reuse researchers propose to industry so that industry practitioners want to listen?

  • What do reuse researchers have to know about industry to identify reuse problems/targets that are relevant to industry needs?

  • Is research delivering the results industry needs to make reuse safe and secure?

Biographies:


  • Martin Griss (moderator), is Director of the Silicon Valley Campus, Associate Dean, College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University and previous Director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center. He has nearly 40 years of academic and industrial research experience. He currently leads research into the context-aware mobile companion, disaster management, systematic software reuse, sensor-enabled smart spaces environments and the Web of Things, applying mobile technology and context-aware software agents to improve the mobile user’s experience. He is co-author with Ivar Jacobson on a well-known UML-based software reuse book.

  • Juan Llorens, is Professor at the Informatics Department in Carlos III University of Madrid – Spain (www.uc3m.es), as well as CTO in The Reuse Company (www.reusecompany.com). Dr. Llorens worked as technical director in several companies until he joined the University. Since 2003 he is Professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid. His main subject is Knowledge Reuse. Since 2008, based on an agreement with his University, he shares his academic duties with a position of CTO in The Reuse Company that commercializes systems engineering quality and reuse technology. His current research involves the study of Knowledge technologies and System Engineering techniques integration towards Software and Information quality measurement and Reuse.  He is member of INCOSE’s (International Council on Systems Engineering, (www.incose.org) Requirements Working Group.

  • Ted Biggerstaff, is the CTO (and founder) of Software Generators, LLC working on machine architecture independent generation, which allows two independent domain specific inputs: (1) an Implementation Neutral Specification (INS) of the computation and (2) a specification of the machine architecture optimizations desired. This allows the fully automated generation of architecturally optimized code as well as the switching between machine architectures without reprogramming the computation. Previously, he was Program Manager at Microsoft Research. Before that he was a research Director at MCC (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation). He organized with Alan Perlis the first workshop on software reuse (1983). He has edited (with Alan Perlis) an early book on reuse and written an early book on PC Systems Software. He holds five patents and has written many papers on reuse, design recovery, reengineering, and software tools. He is a frequent invited or keynote speaker (GCSE, ICSM, KBSE, ASE and others), and conference panelist. He received a PhD in computer science from University of Washington.

  • Bill Frakes, is an associate professor in the computer science department at Virginia Tech. He chairs the IEEE TCSE committee on software reuse, and was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He has a B.L.S. from the University of Louisville, an M.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Syracuse University.

  • Tullio Vardanega, is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Padua, Italy, which he joined in 2002. He obtained his PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, while working at European Space Agency (ESA) at their Research and Technology Centre. He was with ESA between 1991-2001, holding responsibilities for research and technology transfer projects on topics ranging from software engineering methods and tools to real-time systems theory and technology for use in the production of the software embedded onboard satellite platforms and launcher avionics. At Padua he took on teaching and research responsibilities in the areas of high-integrity real-time systems, quality of service under real-time constraints and software engineering methods, including model-driven engineering and component-based development, and related processes. He has been running a score of research projects in the areas of his research interests on funding from international and national organizations. He has been a member of IEEE for the last 20 years. He is also the Italian representative in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22, the international standardization subcommittee for programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces, where he is especially active in WG9 (Ada) and WG23 (Programming Language Vulnerabilities). Since 2004 he is president of Ada-Europe.


Panel Format:


  • A more energetic format of panel. Rather than 4-5 short mini talks, each person will briefly introduce themselves, and I would be an active moderator, bouncing the dialog back and forth. Maybe we can get some "shills" in the audience to ask provocative questions, or make radical statements.