Lero Distinguished Lecture Series

What would a science of software engineering look like?

Dr. James Herbsleb, Professor in the Institute for Software Research in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

In software engineering research, human characteristics have traditionally been treated as peripheral. We have also seen, over the 50 years or so that software engineering has existed as a field of research, nearly continuous hand-wringing about our unsatisfyingly small impact on practice. In this talk, I argue that these two traits are closely-related and stem from the same source, which is treating the way humans think, act, and coordinate as outside the core concerns of our discipline. We need a fundamental shift in our culture, training, time horizon, and research focus in order to set the field on a path of long-term progress.

About the speaker

Dr. James Herbsleb is a Professor in the Institute for Software Research in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie primarily in the intersection of software engineering, computer-supported cooperative work, and socio-technical systems, focusing on such areas as geographically distributed development teams and large-scale open source development. His research has won several awards, including the ICSE Most Influential Paper award in 2010, and several distinguished papers and best paper awards at ICSE, CWCW, ESEM, and Academy of Management. He was awarded the SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award in 2016, and previously the Alan Newell Award for Research Excellence in 2014. For about two decades, he has had the privilege of working with outstanding colleagues and students to try to understand the complex and dynamic relationship between human collaboration and the software that humans design and use.