Mark Staples

The day I got back from Rio, I was on the plane again to go to Melbourne, for the SEPG Australia conference, where I presented a talk Why Organisation’s (Don’t) Choose CMMI. The talk was a variant of the one I’d done for the ESE Breakfast seminar. For this audience I didn’t need to provide quite so much background on CMMI, and so I expanded a little on the setting and interpretation of the work instead.

The talk included some material from our paper An Exploratory Study of Why Organizations Do Not Adopt CMMI, which has now been accepted for publication, in the Journal of Systems and Software.

On Tuesday 26 September I got back from Rio de Janeiro, after having attended ISERN (a research network), IASESE (a school), and ISESE (a conference). A full week of empirical software engineering goodness, but sadly not much spare time to look around Rio.

ISESE (the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering) was the main reason I was there. I presented a paper Evaluating Guidelines for Empirical Software Engineering Studies, which was about how we evaluated a proposed set of guidelines for reporting controlled experiments in software engineering. I was one of 10 (!) authors. We used a perspective-based reading approach to review the guidelines from the perspectives of various kinds of stakeholders (Researchers, Reviewers, Replicators, Meta-Analysts, Practioner/Consultants, Authors). We expressed the needs of the stakeholders as questions about papers that we imagined had been written using the guidelines.

My last full day in Rio was almost too exciting – in the morning Emilia Mendes and I did a tag-team presentation of Maggie Wojcicki’s paper (Maggie had lost her voice on the flight to Rio), in the afternoon both (coincidentally) my paper and Emilia’s won distinguished paper awards at the conference, and then after a few rounds of volleyball on the beach, I got to do a bit of surf lifesaving when a student got caught in a rip. Luckily a local swam out to help with the rescue – I assisted for a while, but by the end of it all I was just rescuing myself. Everyone was OK.

Josef Nedstam and I have finally had our paper Evolving Strategies for Software Architecture and Reuse accepted for publication, in the Journal Software Process: Improvement and Practice. It’s been through a couple of iterations/submissions, but from go-to-whoa it will have taken about 3 years to see this published from when we first wrote it. It’s a nice story, mostly based on data from Josef’s PhD work, about how the best form of architecture-driven reuse for an organization depends on its business situation, and how they both can change over time. It’s an extension/response to Jan Bosch’s view of increasing levels of maturity for reuse (product line development).