Connecting Research and Practice of Software Engineering in the North Netherlands

About

The North SE workshop serves as a platform for both software engineering researchers and industry professionals to delve into theoretical and applied elements, tackle technical hurdles, and identify potential collaborative ventures.

In the current edition, the workshop coincides with a Ph.D. defense on ‘The need for speed: increasing the code review velocity’, capitalizing on the attendance of distinguished software engineering experts and practitioners hailing from the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States.

Our Speakers

Prof. Arie van Deursen, Professor and head of Software Technology at the Delft University of Technology

Prof. Alexander Serebrenik, Professor of Social Software Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology

Prof. Rui Abreu, Professor in Software Engineering at FEUP

Prof. Tijs van der Storm, Senior Researcher in SWAT team, CWI (also Full Professor at the University of Groningen)

Date & Venue

Join us in the House of Connections on the 17th of October 2023

Where: Grote Markt 21, 9712 HR Groningen

How to reach the venue? See here: https://www.rug.nl/staff/location/4428

When: 11:00 - 15:00 hours CEST

Registration

Fill in the form indicating your availability and food preferences.

Detailed Program

Abstracts

Gender, emotions and software development
   by Alexander Serebrenik

As software development is a human activity, it is essential for us to understand how different individuals experience it, and how do they work together. In this talk we illustrate these two complementary perspectives by discussing experiences of women in software development, on the one hand, and emotions expressed in developers’ teams, on the other. The studies call for providing better tools and more inclusive processes ensuring that individual talents can jointly lead to better software.

Biography: Alexander Serebrenik is a full professor of social software engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. His work tends to involve theories and methods both from within computer science (e.g., theory of socio-technical coordination; methods from natural language processing, machine learning) and from outside of computer science (e.g., organisational psychology). The underlying idea of his work is that of empiricism, i.e., that addressing software engineering challenges should be grounded in observation and experimentation, and requires a combination of the social and the technical perspectives. Alexander has co-authored two books “Evolving Software Systems” (Springer Verlag, 2014) and “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Software Engineering”(APress, 2023), and more than 240 scientific papers and articles. He is actively involved in organisation of scientific conferences and is member of the editorial board of several journals. He has won multiple best paper and distinguished reviewer awards. Alexander is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Contact him at a.serebrenik@tue.nl.

Moving Fast While Delivering High-Quality Code
   by Rui Abreu

In this talk Rui from Meta Productivity organization talks about how their team collects productivity metrics across the global engineering organization for all of Meta. Rui talks about how their team creates productivity dashboards for the engineering organization and the metrics that they capture to measure productivity. Rui will discuss the 3 pillars of his organization: acceleration code quality and their latest work on code readability. Rui discusses the balance between release acceleration and code quality while having code readability in mind that impacts the cognitive load of developers. The ultimate goal is to ship software fast and at scale while making developers productive and happier.

Biography: Rui Abreu holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science – Software Engineering from the Delft University of Technology The Netherlands and a M.Sc. in Computer and Systems Engineering from the University of Minho Portugal. His research revolves around software quality with emphasis in automating the testing and debugging phases of the software development life-cycle as well as self-adaptation. He has extensive expertise in both static and dynamic analysis algorithms for improving software quality. He is the recipient of 6 Best Paper Awards and his work has attracted considerable attention. Before joining the Instituto Superior Técnico of University of Lisbon as an Associate Professor he was a member of the Model-Based Reasoning group at PARC’s System and Sciences Laboratory. Currently he is a Research Software Engineer with Meta.

Ensō: don’t design you programs, program your designs.
   by Tijs van der Storm

As Herbert Simon states in “Sciences of the Artificial”, design is selecting among alternatives, optimizing a certain utility function. There are many utility functions in programming: performance, reusability, portability, code velocity etc. In this talk I will present Ensō, a programming system aimed at radically separating concerns in programming to optimize maintainability. Ensō works by specifying “what” needs to be implemented in little DSLs capturing various concerns, such as data, access control, workflow, etc. “How” these concerns are implemented is realized by composing and interpreting the DSLs at run time. I will briefly touch upon the history of the project, motivate why something like Ensō is needed, and give a live demo using the current implementation prototype.

Side note: this talk, and Ensō itself, can be seen as being at the complete opposite end of the spectrum compared to Gunnar’s empirical dissertation (because it’s about design) and his fondness of raw performance (because it’s, as of yet, slow…).

Biography: Tijs van der Storm is senior researcher at CWI where he leads the Software Analysis & Transformation (SWAT) group, and part-time full professor of software engineering at RUG. His research goals can be summarized as: how to make better programming languages and how to better make programming languages. He is an active member of the Software Language Engineering (SLE) and Programming Languages (PL) community, and one of the co-designers of the Rascal meta programming language and language workbench. He is further chair of the IFIP TC2 Working group 2.16 on Language Design, chair of VERSEN, the Dutch national association for software engineering, vice-president of AITO, and treasurer of the EAPLS. He likes poetry and dislikes ugly code.

Explainable software engineering - Rethinking the full SE life cycle
   by Arie van Deursen

In artificial intelligence (AI), it’s increasingly recognized that components that learn from data need to be explainable. In this talk, we take explainability one step further, using it as a lens to rethink the full software engineering life cycle. To that end, we start from explainability in AI, focusing on counterfactual reasoning and algorithmic recourse. We revisit automated program repair, AI-powered coding, delay prediction, and IT governance. Based on this, we envision a future of software engineering in which explainability is a first-class citizen.

Biography: Arie van Deursen is a professor in software engineering at Delft University of Technology, where he’s also head of the Software Technology department. He holds an MSc degree from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1990) and a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (1994). His research interests include software testing, language models for code, human aspects of software engineering and trustworthy artificial intelligence. He’s scientific director of the Delft Fintech Lab and co-PI of the NWO Long Term Program Robust (2022-2032) on trustworthy AI. Based on his research, he co-founded the Software Improvement Group (2000) and PerfectXL (2014). For the Dutch government, he serves on the Advisory Council for ICT Assessments (AcICT).