Seminar by Dr.Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc (École Polytechnique de Montréal)

Speaker: Dr. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc
                École Polytechnique de Montréal

Title: Successful and Unsuccessful Experiments in Software Engineering: Win-Win Situation

Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Time: 1:30 - 2:30PM

Place: EV 1.162

ABSTRACT

In the recent years, the research community in software engineering has rapidly turned towards experimental studies as means (1) to gain knowledge about the state of the practice and (2) to support novel ideas and "prove" their validity. Unfortunately, some experimental studies are sometimes unsuccessful in that they fail to bring data supporting the novel ideas. These studies are usually difficult to publish because some authors and reviewers tend to dismiss them "failures". In this presentation, after discussing some past experiments, we will focus on one successful experiment and one unsuccessful experiment and show that both are valuable and bring novel understanding in software engineering. We will then discuss how unsuccessful experiments should be described and evaluated to help the research community.

BIO

Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc is full professor at the Department of computer and software engineering of École Polytechnique de Montréal where he leads the Ptidej team on evaluating and enhancing the quality of object-oriented programs by promoting the use of patterns, at the language-, design-, or architectural-levels. He is IEEE Senior Member since 2010. In 2009, he was awarded the NSERC Research Chair Tier II on Software Patterns and Patterns of Software. He holds a Ph.D. in software engineering from University of Nantes, France (under Professor Pierre Cointe's supervision) since 2003 and an Engineering Diploma from École des Mines of Nantes since 1998. His Ph.D. thesis was funded by Object Technology International, Inc. (now IBM OTI Labs.), where he worked in 1999 and 2000. His research interests are program understanding and program quality during development and maintenance, in particular through the use and the identification of recurring patterns. He was the first to use explanation-based constraint programming in the context of software engineering to identify occurrences of patterns. He is interested also in empirical software engineering; he uses eye-trackers to understand and to develop theories about program comprehension. He has published many papers in international conferences and journals, including IEEE TSE, Springer EMSE, ACM/IEEE ICSE, and IEEE ICSM. He is currently (2013-2014) in sabbatical in Korea, working with colleagues at KAIST, Yonsei U., and SNU.

*This seminar will be co-sponsored by the ENCS Software Engineering Research Center (SERC)