RiSE’s Interviews: Episode 6 – Software Reuse with Dr. John D. McGregor

After the 4th Workshop to Introduce Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE), in Recife. An interview was performed with John D. McGregor an associate professor of computer science at Clemson University, a founding partner of Luminary Software, and a Visiting Scientist at Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

This interview is available here.

I would like to thank McGregor for accepted the podcast invitation, and inform that was a very nice experience and a pleasure, interview a person with this importance for the research community.

1) Talk a little bit about your career, how do you initiated, your graduation and their relationship with industry. I would like to know about your experiences and the work at the university and industry, your challenges as a reuse practitioner and after in the industry and how as the road to be there because it is a 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?

* This interview was performed by Paulo Anselmo from RiSE Labs.

IV Workshop to Introduce Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE) - Workshop Report

4th WIRE, the Workshop to Introduce Reuse in Enterprises, the right place to discuss the state of the practice and exchange experiences with the most important reuse experts from Brazil and the world as well, was held at the Hotel Atlante Plaza in Recife, Brazil, in the last June 29 and 30.

The workshop attendance joined reuse practitioners from industry and academy. This year, people from 10 states in Brazil, and from European countries (Portugal, The Netherlands and Ireland) as well, comprising a set of 17 companies and 5 universities, came to the event.

Great discussions on reuse topic were performed, in which practitioners conducted a very interesting environment to discuss such a topic. This edition, WIRE were mainly concerned about the strategic reuse adoption based on Software Product Line (SPL) aspects, with the presence of important experts in this area, John D. McGregor, from Clemson University (US), presenting the tutorial Building Reusable Testing Assets for a Software Product Line and the keynote entitled Goal-driven Product Derivation; Frank van der Linden, from Philips Research (The Netherlands), with the tutorial Software Product Line engineering, the practical aspects, and a speech on Applying open source development in product line engineering; and Eduardo Almeida, from C.E.S.A.R (Brazil), presenting the topic Software Reuse Measurement: What the Experts Think about It.

Moreover, work-in-group sessions (see a picture of this activity in the left) were performed that enabled the attendance to discuss the following questions: 1) What are the main pitfalls and challenges to the SPL adoption in your company and how they can be handled? and 2) Which changes must be implemented in the organization in order to address such issues? This effort made possible to attendance to exchange experience and ideas to be applied in order to solve still opened questions regarding SPL adoption in companies.

At the end of the event it was announced that next WIRE, the 5th edition, will be held in São Paulo - Brazil. We will be pleased to receive you in a next turn in order to make our discussion even better!

In name of the organization, I would like to say thank you for the participants, lecturers, and sponsors. See you next year at WIRE!