Panel 2:
Escaped from the Lab! Does ICSE Research Make a Difference?
For 50 years ICSE has brought together researchers and practitioners in software engineering to share innovative research ideas. This panel will debate how ICSE research has influenced software education, practices, and products – and look forward to the future. Join us for a celebratory panel as ICSE marks its 50th anniversary.
Panel Organization:
- Panel organizer and moderator: Steve Fraser,
Innoxec (USA/Canada)
- Panel raconteur and co-facilitator: Dennis Mancl, MSWX Software Experts (USA)
Panelists:
- Robert Biddle,
Carleton University (Canada)
- Margaret Burnett,
Oregon State University (USA)
- Ciera Jaspan,
Google Research (USA)
- Tim Lister,
The Atlantic Systems Guild (USA)
- Gail Murphy,
The University of British Columbia (Canada)
- Jonathan Aldrich, CMU (USA)
Panelist Bios and Position Statements:
Robert Biddle
Robert Biddle is Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, with an honorary appointment at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research has always concerned human factors in Computer Science, drawing on principles and methods from cognitive and social sciences. The topics addressed have includes programming language design, software development, and cybersecurity. Robert is a dual citizen of Canada and New Zealand, and his education and academic career have been in both countries. He has awards for research, teaching, and graduate mentorship. Robert is a Fellow of the New Zealand Computer Society, and a British Commonwealth Scholar.
Position: "The ultimate goal of all computer science is the program." So began the Bauhaus-based manifesto of Notes on Postmodern Programming that James Noble and I wrote in 2002. One of the themes of that paper was embracing a variety of perspectives, even simultaneously. I suggest that this theme explains why ICSE research has made a difference and why it should strive to make more difference in the future. That difference is not about escaping from the lab, but rather dissolving the boundaries of the lab.
A glance at recent ICSE tracks shows the nature of ICSE: New Ideas and Emerging Results, Artifact Evaluation, Industry Challenge, Demonstrations, Software Engineering Education and Training, Software Engineering in Practice, Software Engineering in Society, Technical Briefings. And there are also workshops and co-located conferences. This diversity of perspectives has been very beneficial for all involved. It has increasingly reflected the nature of the world of software: huge, diverse, and multifaceted. I don't mention the "Research Track," because almost *all* the tracks, and workshops, and co-located conferences, are about research.
ICSE is mostly for academics. For them ICSE is a welcome wagon, a salon, a marketplace for ideas, opportunities, prestige and patronage. It doesn't have as much direct effect for practitioners, because too few practitioners read the papers or attend the conferences, and even fewer write papers or give presentations. Instead, they read blogs and books, watch YouTube videos, and attend industry presentations and training courses. The effect ICSE has for practitioners is typically indirect at most. ACM and IEEE rhetoric has always included practitioners, but our conferences have grown to become focused on academics. ICSE research has made a difference, but not enough for practitioners. I conclude with another extract from our 2002 manifesto: "Let us therefore create a new guild of programmers without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between programmers and computer scientists!"
Margaret Burnett
Margaret Burnett is a University Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. As the recipient of 4 patents, Margaret has received 10 best paper awards/honorable mentions and 6 long-term impact awards, in addition to multiple mentoring, service, and research awards. Margaret is an ACM Fellow, and in 2022 received IEEE's TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering Award, for outstanding and sustained contributions to the software engineering community.
Margaret's research runs the gamut of human-centric aspects of developing software better. Together with her students and collaborators, she co-founded the area of end-user software engineering for both traditional software and for AI; brought information foraging theory to software tools that support today's developers; and debunked the belief that software is gender-neutral, inventing methods to eradicate software's gender-inclusivity "bugs." Her work has impacted commercial software used by millions of people.
Position: "Escaping from the Lab" is such a great topic for deep thought. For years and years, we've all heard each other complain about the failure of our latest and greatest tool, method, algorithm, approach, etc. to be adopted in the real world. To understand that issue, it's worthwhile to think about counterexamples in which some Software Engineering research product was successfully adopted in the real world, and with substantial impact. I will focus on one attribute of research successes: getting outside the box.
Being outside the box is a good way to escape from inside-the-box traps that populate researchers' worlds. These traps can keep us SE researchers too focused on the next obvious paper. We continue thinking along the lines of "what else (publishable) can I automate?" (or for empirical SE researchers, "what study can I run next?"). I believe that these traps can send us into a spiral that often leads to mediocrity, and at their worst lead to death of the field and an ever-worsening climate for the society of all software researchers, practitioners, and users. So, although staying inside the box is one possible set of Futures for software, but it is not a good one.
Escaping from these boxes produces another possible set of Futures for us. I have some examples from the past we can learn from, where some SE researchers escaped from their boxes to build a societally positive and impactful connection to real world software. These outside-the-box contributions provide examples of how you too can get outside of whatever box you're in.
Ciera Jaspan
Ciera Jaspan is the tech lead manager of the Engineering Productivity Research within Developer Infrastructure at Google. The Engineering Productivity Research team brings a data-driven approach to business decisions around engineering productivity. They use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to triangulate on measuring productivity. Ciera previously worked on Tricorder, Google's static analysis platform. She received her BSc in Software Engineering from Cal Poly and her PhD from Carnegie Mellon, where she worked with Jonathan Aldrich on cost-effective static analysis and software framework design.
Tim Lister
Tim Lister is a Principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, based in New York, and divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing. Tim focuses on project early activities, having become convinced that if you get the early activities right, you just might have a great project. If you muddle through the early activities, you will muddle all the way through the project. The early activities include, but are not limited to, project goals definition, project staffing, project estimating, requirements and constraints definition, requirements management, process selection, and product release strategy. Tim is co-author with Tom DeMarco of Waltzing With Bears: Managing Software Project Risk. Tim and Tom are also co-authors of Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.
Tim has over 40 years of professional software development experience. Before the formation of the Atlantic Systems Guild, he worked at Yourdon Inc where he was an Executive Vice President and Fellow. Tim holds an AB from Brown University, and is a life member of the IEEE, and a member of the ACM. He is a Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering by IREB. He also serves as a panelist for the American Arbitration Association, arbitrating disputes involving software and software services, and has served as an expert witness in litigation proceedings involving software problems.
Position: As a career practitioner I feel a bit like a zebra at a horse show when I come to an ICSE. On the other hand, my first ICSE was in 1984, and since then the horses have always welcomed me to feed at their trough. We practitioners are usually deeply disinterested in reading dissertations yet we are deeply interested in your findings, and therefore your opinions, about creating, constructing, and delivering software. Looking over past proceedings, I can build a long list of thinkers who had an enormous impact on my thinking about the huge complexity of bringing forth valuable, reliable products. To make you feel proud of what we all attempt to do, if you missed this, please read The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, a 2012 book by Jon Gertner. I end my position with a call. As ICSE Community members and IEEE or ACM members we to speak out against the disabling and debasing of valuable research currently ongoing in all fields in the USA. Indeed, all of academia is under attack by people who wish to define truth without facts and without science.
Gail Murphy
Gail C. Murphy is a Professor of Computer Science and Vice-President Research and Innovation at The University of British Columbia. Gail's research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. Gail is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a co-founder of Tasktop Technologies Inc, an enterprise software company that was acquired by Planview Inc. in 2022.
Position: Research insights and discoveries can move from the lab into impacting practice in many ways. Sometimes the movement is implicit and transitive. A conversation at a conference like ICSE between two researchers might spark an idea, the idea is later transmitted to a colleague in industry that one of the researchers knows, and some industrial practices might be altered. Other times, the movement may be the result of information presented at the conference that directly impact an industrial participant. Yet another when is when a research discovery that is published and discussed at a conference is licensed into a product built by a company that supports some software development practice, or the researchers themselves commercialize the discovery by way of a start-up company. These few ways are not exhaustive.
I've had the good fortune to be involved in a few situations where research from my group has transitioned into practice. One example is from my PhD thesis work. In this case, I performed a case study at Microsoft with software I had developed on a Microsoft product. Microsoft then implemented the idea to better fit their environment and put the idea into use. Another example is research that we transitioned from conference publications and theses into a spin-off company. That spin-off company grew over 15 years into serving many Fortune 100 companies and then was acquired in 2022. I look forward to the panel discussions about the myriad of ways that research definitely does finds its way into use and impact in software development.
Jonathan Aldrich
Bio: Jonathan works at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering. His research explores how the way we express software affects our ability to engineer software at scale. A particular theme of much of his work is improving software quality and programmer productivity through better ways to express structural and behavioral aspects of software design within source code. Jonathan contributed to object-oriented typestate checking, modular and gradual verification techniques for aspects and stateful programs, and new object-oriented language models. For his work specifying and verifying architecture, he received a 2006 NSF CAREER award and the 2007 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize.
Panel Organization:
Steven Fraser (Panel impresario and moderator)
Steven Fraser is an independent researcher and consultant for Innoxec based in Silicon Valley, California. He advises companies, universities, and government agencies on strategies and practices to catalyze partnerships that accelerate product R&D through collaboration, networking, and open innovation. Previously, Steve led HP's Global University Programs, served as the Director of the Cisco Research Center, led Qualcomm's technical learning programs, served as a Visiting Scientist at CMU's Software Engineering Institute, and was the California-based Senior Manager for BNR/Nortel's Global External Research and Disruptive Technologies Team. As an expert on tech transfer, company-university collaboration, and software best practices, Steve leverages his corporate experience to advise corporate, university, and government clients. As a conference and panel impresario, Steve has organized over 100 interactive panels, workshops, and forums for the ACM, IEEE, Agile Alliance, HP, Cisco, Qualcomm, and Nortel to foster collaboration and community learning. Steve received a PhD in Electrical (Software) Engineering from McGill University (Montréal), a MSc in Engineering Physics (Queen's at Kingston), and a BSc in Physics and Computer Science (McGill University). Steve is a Senior Member of both the ACM and the IEEE and was recognized as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Contributor in 2021. Beginning with his work in software reuse in the late 1980s, Steve believes that the best software should be the software you don't need to write. To this end, collaboration, communication, and coordination are key - whether catalyzing the escape of innovations from the lab or delivering resilient and trustworthy software in the service of humanity.
Dennis Mancl (Panel raconteur and co-facilitator)
Dennis Mancl is a retired software developer and coach with decades of Bell Labs experience in software practices. Dennis is most interested in the soft issues of software engineering: teamwork, collaboration, design brainstorming, refactoring, diverse teams, critical thinking skills, and continuing education. Dennis is always open to learning new things about software principles and practices. He continues to be an active presenter at international conferences, with a special interest in organizing and reporting on conference panel discussions. Dennis believes that the future of software engineering will be a set of technologies and practices that will drive us to develop less and less code. If we do it right, that lower volume of code will be faster, more resilient, and better quality.