FSE'2016 panel

1. .lusoftware verification & validation
VVS
The State of Software
Engineering Research
Lionel Briand
FSE’16, November 16, 2016

2. Question 1
• Do you believe our community as a whole is achieving the
right balance of science, engineering, and design in its
combined research efforts?
• Engineering and design aspects do not get nearly enough
attention.
• We need to devise not only novel, sound solutions but also
practical and scalable ones.
• Significant variations across domains and contexts.
2

3. Question 2
• What new or existing areas of research do you think our community
should pay more attention to?
• The problem is not with the areas we focus on, but with the dominant
paradigm of academic research.
• Research largely disconnected from practical engineering needs and
priorities.
• We fail to recognize the significant variations across domains and
context.
• In our discipline, context factors (including human ones), working
assumptions, make a huge difference.
3

4. Question 3
• Do you have novel suggestions for how we could improve our
research methods to increase the impact of software engineering
research in the near and distant future?
• More collaborative research with industry, leading to a better
definition and prioritization of problems, realistic working
assumptions in various application domains, better evaluation of
practicality and scalability.
• We are not a branch of computer science. We need to accept the
fact that industrial (applied) research, driven by practicality and
scalability considerations, is a necessary component of an
engineering discipline.
4