SE metrics (Software Engineering)

Link to the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0552167266/ref=sr_1_1/253-4676796-1009806?ie=UTF8&qid=1482399808&sr=8-1&keywords=creativity+inc and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity,_Inc.

Naturally a lot has been written about the best academic environment and academic excellence, and while reading this book about Pixar animation studios, I kept reflecting on our profession and environments. In the book, the author present his experiences with the start-up of the studios and its later successes.

What struck me the most was the way in which the studios nurtures creativity. They acknowledge directly that creativity is not something that strikes one as a lightning from a blue sky, but a result of a a long process. It requires a number of diverse roles to come together – different roles, but all with equal voice – everyone has to have the right to provide an opinion and discuss it. They should be able to openly and honestly question and discuss other’s opinions.

I see this to be aligned with the academic spirit, and from my observations the best academic environments are the ones where teamwork and team spirit are the most important ones.

I sincerely recommend this book as an inspiration in the creating process of research!

By Source, Fair use, Link

The figure is a link to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity,_Inc.

Keeping Continuous Deliveries Safe, by S. Vöst and S. Wagner

Link to article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.04164v1.pdf

One of the challenges in introducing Agile software development into safety critical systems engineering is the ability to secure the safety properties. A number of solutions exist to that challenge, none of them successfully adopted in commercial product development, though. At least to my best knowledge.

The authors of this article propose a way of addressing this challenge by continuous safety builds. A good thing is the fact that this is in the context of automotive software development, although still in the idea phase. Hope to see more of this kind of research soon!

Abstract (of the article, quoted directly from the source):

Allowing swift release cycles, Continuous Delivery has become popular in application software development and
is starting to be applied in safety-critical domains such as the automotive industry.

These domains require thorough analysis regarding safety constraints, which can be achieved by formal verification and the execution of safety tests resulting from a safety analysis on the product. With continuous delivery in place, such tests need to be executed with every build to ensure the latest software still fullfills all safety requirements. Even more though, the safety analysis has to be updated with every change to ensure the safety
test suite is still up-to-date.

We thus propose that a safety analysis should be treated no differently from other deliverables such as source-code and dependencies, formulate guidelines on how to achieve this and advert areas where future research is needed.

I’ve recently done a personal mobility project with Volvo Cars (www.volvocars.com), which was a fantastic experience. I managed to be on Volvo’s site one day a week and developed the course for them — actionable dashboards:)

Here is a short movie about this collaboration, done with the colleagues at Volvo Cars, courtesy of Chalmers.

Link to vimeo

Quite recently I’ve reda one of the books by Daniel H. Pink – “Drive” – which describes what motivates us in general, but in particular in the areas where creativity and research.

In my opinion the ideas of motivation 3.0 are highly applicable for our students. In particular the ability to provide our young colleagues with the ability to become intrinsically motivated to gain the knowledge. We need to understand how to provide them with the “flow” types of task – something that will let the students feel that the task is challenging, but not too difficult.

In the next “software quality” course some of these ideas will come to existence.

We’re starting to take up some online trainings for measurement. The first one is about ISO 15939 and its measurement information model.

Go to the video at GU play: Measurement information model

I’ve read a very interesting article in one of the recents IEEE Software magazines by Darja Smite, Fabio Calefaro and Claes Wohlin:  http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/issues/2015/08/mso2015040026.pdf 

The authors look critically at the body of knowledge in the area trying to find evidence of the cost savings. The results are that the evidence is not in the published articles. Does that mean that it is not possible to publish about it? or does it mean that there is no real evidence and the companies make decisions based on the “gut-feeling”?

It will be interesting to observe what happens with the body-of-knowledge on the topics in the longer run.