Sunday, July 13, 2008

RiSE’s Interviews: Episode 5 – Software Reuse with Dr. Jan Bosch

During the 3rd Workshop to Introduce Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE), I performed an interview with Jan Bosch, an outstanding researcher working in the software architecture and software product lines area. Nowadays, Jan is a VP from Intuit. You can listen it here.

I would like to thank Jan for the interview and patience because of the noise at the hotel during this podcast. Thus, I will publish the questions here in order to facilitate it.

1 - You started you career as a software engineering professor in the Netherlands and after that you moved to Nokia Research Center and nowadays you are working at Intuit in the U.S. I would like to know about these experiences and the work at the university and industry, your challenges as a professor and after that in the industry as a VP and how as the road to be there because it is an incredible career.

2 - You worked a lot with software architecture and software product lines. For you, what is the importance of the industry in the field?

3 - In the software product line area, we can see the community increasing. In the last year, during SPLC, we had more than 200 participants and too many from the industry. In your opinion what are the ingredients for this success in this conference?

4 - For you, is there difference between domain engineering and software product lines?

5 - You had/have many projects with the industry. What are the main problems to introduce software product lines in companies?
What are the risks and how to avoid them? Finally, how to define a road to start it in companies?

6 - Some companies believe that software product lines can be a good approach to obtain benefits related to time-to-market cost reduction, etc. However, we do not have many specific models to show the risks, the benefits, economic models etc. So, how to show for companies that a software product lines approach can be good?

7 - You had many industrial projects in the software product lines area. For you, what were the strong, weak points and main lessons learned?

8 - How to introduce software product lines in a software factory working with different domains?

9 - We can see in the reuse field, ideas like: modules, objects, components, software product lines, and others ones such as models, services, DSLs. For you what can be the next one?

10 - For you what is the state of the practice in the area and the directions for future research?

2 comments:

Ricardo Cavalcanti said...

awesome interview. Jan's experience is really inspiring. I totally agree with the mix of academia and industry, specially in the context of software engineering.

Eduardo Almeida said...

Yes, I agree with you too, Ricardo. For me, this mix is essential. It is important that I asked the same question for Ivica, Dirk, etc.. and all of them had similar answers highlighting the term e n g i n e e r i n g, it is, we need practice.
On the other hand, I agree with Parnas (http://www.europrog.ru/paper/dp1999e.pdf): the university is important because with it, I have time to think, however, I do not have the real problems. By the way, at industry, you have the problems, but often, you do not have time to think and experiment new approaches, direction.
So, I like staying in the middle.
But for me, it was very good to hear Jan saying: I would like to go through the industry to back to reality.