Posts tagged ‘conference’

Impressions from ICSE 2010 – part 4

The last session before lunch contain two interesting talks – the first talk was on the automated processing of ‘clones’ in requirements documents. I wish I had that tool while I was working at IBM, as it would have saved me tons of time. The second talk was given by Roland Yap from Singapore University was about the detection and visualisation of dependencies between software components. The main two things from his talk were: a) Roland and his team had confirmed that during runtime software has a bunch of dependencies that you can find using static analysis techniques (i.e., source code) – at least for Microsoft Windows based applications, and b) there approach for visualising the dependencies looks promising for dealing with a large number of inter-dependencies.

Impressions from ICSE 2010 – part 3

After a day of listening to presentations of immense depth of details, it was nice to have chance to chat with other conference attendees at Microsoft sponsored Gala dinner – although I was led astray by a Dutchman and a Pole.

The first talk I attended was presented by a guy who had reviewed 30million lines of code from open source projects to conclude the pre-processor is mostly a waste of time. The next presenter talked about a survey of practitioners understanding and use of (some) object oriented programming concepts. The survey was very large (3500+ responses), but the number of presented conclusions was very limited -
and the paper was probably better suited for education track. The last talk before lunch was by Microsoft researcher who rocked up with a Mac Book Pro (although running Windows 7). He presented their prototype CodeBook aimed at visualising the relationships between developers and their code. The aim was to help a developer identify other developers who may have written or otherwise knowledgeable about libraries or other parts of code used by the developer.

After lunch, I chose to attend the legal research track which although was interesting due my painful experiences from previous employments -
these sessions did take on a new level of geekness – and the general level of geekness was already pretty high…

On a more general note, almost no one refers to software architects as part of their talks – it is almost exclusively business analysts and developers as the only project roles considered. The main structure of the presented papers appear to have the following parts: 1) data gathering from field projects, 2) tool development and 3) trialling of the tool in the industry setting. The level of tool sophistication is slight concern for me, as people seem to have spend significant effort in developing pretty looking tools.

Impressions from ICSE 2010 – part 2

The ICSE 2010 opening ceremony had an exciting line-up with Desmond Tutu and (for me little known) Clem Sunter. The opening started with an emotional speech by Jeff Kramer (General Chair) as bringing ICSE to South African had been a life long dream. Judith Bishop (co-general chair) then went on to show the amazing breath in participation from around the world: 48 countries including participation from a number of new countries. The program chairs Sebastian Uchitel showed that the fears of low submission rates due to the conference being located in South Africa was unfounded – 380 submissions which was the second highest in the history of ICSE (Vancouver 2009 had 410). Prem Devanbu (co program chair) supplied the first joke of the morning. He demonstrated how he had automated the paper review process and managed to achieve an amazing 87 percent accuracy compared the real acceptance rate – only problem was that his program had rejected ALL papers

Tutu unfortunately had to attend other matters and as such had to cancel – but he did provide a video recorded welcome message. Very graceful.

Clem Sunter was a surprise for (at least) me. I hadn’t really heard much about him, but he really gave a very impressive key note speech – very funny man with a very serious topic. He was clearly a very smart guy, as he’d used his future scenario methodology to predict a significant terrorist attack on US (which he had told Bush in a letter only a few months before 9/11) and the credit crunch. You can read more on his website: http://www.mindofafox.com/introduction.php. But the best part was his humour and infectious laugh

At the moment, I’m listening to a presentation of a paper by a seriously smart young guy, Zibin Zheng, from The Chinese University of Hong Kong titled “Collaborative Reliability Prediction of Service Oriented Systems”. I had the pleasure of meeting Zibin at an impromptue dinner with Eric Harper (from ABB Research) and a few others from the conference. I had Thai and a few Castle beers – South African brand. Food in Cape Town hasn’t been super impressive (coffee has been poor), but at least both food and coffee is cheap compared to Sydney. The real surprise here is the local beer – it is very nice and cheap – so no complaints from me

Impressions from ICSE 2010 – part 1

After a long tiring flight to Cape Town (and the loss of my mobile in the back of the taxi), I arrived in Cape Town late Friday (30th) evening. Everything looked very new – in fact my hotel is less than a year old – no doubt due to the World Cup next months. People is very friendly and appear very keen on demonstrating the very best of South Africa, although it does occasionally show a level of inexperience – going along with the newness of everything. Sunday was my first conference day, and it was straight into the ‘fire’ – I was the second presenter of the day.

The ICSE conference (for me) runs over six days broken into the 3 pre-conference days (listed below) and the actual conference:

• Day 1: 5th Workshop on SHAring and Reuse of architectural Knowledge (SHARK)
• Day 2: Tutorial on Cloud Service Engineering
• Day 3: ICSE Doctoral Symposium
• Day 4 – 6: The main conference

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