Workgoup Meeting, September 23, 2009 - Porto, Portugal
18:15 - 20:00
Attendance: 51
One expert panel was scheduled :
- Long-term Perspective of Agile Methods
Agenda: a tutorial was presented at SoftNet 2009:
- A Functional Approach to Semantic Retrieval of Text Documents
as well as three keynore speeches:
- European Technology Platform NESSI: delivering building blocks for the creation of service based ecosystems
- Future Internet - challenges for the mobile world
- We are confused about what software engineering activities we are performing!
Tutorials are posted at http://www.iaria.org/tutorials.html
Keynote speeches are posted at http://www.iaria.org/speeches.html
Discussions:
- The WG focused on two special items:
- one excellent keynote on software engineering, its pitfalls, and potentially unknown facets
slide deck at: - an expert panel on 'future on agile methodology", with an open output (as summarized by Mira below)
- one excellent keynote on software engineering, its pitfalls, and potentially unknown facets
- Also, the promotion of young researches and PhD candidates was again reinforced; they can play different roles, and they are encouraged of being session chairs.
- An open call to suggest regular refresh to the topics for ICSEA was launched
- Please have a look at ICSEA 2009
Suggestions are welcome at petre@iaria.org - The procedure of invitation-only for extended versions of selected papers among those presented for on-line IARIA journals, with no additional fees, was appreciated.
See: www.iariajournals.org
Suggestions:
- Continue with ‘Poster’ and ‘Work in Progress’ tracks
- Definitively, the technical program committee must be tuned to reflect new topics and assure a fair peer-to-peer review process.
Special topics for further consideration:
- It is the IARIA Board position that everybody should benefit the same access and service during the conference; some suggested to have partial services and reduced registration fees for students. A detailed discussion went on the structure of the registration fees, simply sharing with the audience where each penny goes.
- A particular suggestion will be implemented from the next event: Student Consortium.
- Another suggestion was to have many POPs; while feasible, the drawback is that this will split the community. A try will be prepared for the next event.
Proceeding publications:
- The option to publish in an open digital library was discussed; this will allow having all the proceedings of the co-located events on the same CD Proceedings, and full free access to any publication.
- This issue will be carried further on to the IARIA Board to careful attention.
- It was suggested that some national research Centers encourage scientist to rather publish in openly searchable digital libraries.
Next steps:
- Develop the new topics via off-line exchanges
- Extend invitations for ICSEA committee membership
- Attract scientists in the committee to cover the newly intended areas
- Announce the new topics with the CfP for ICSEA 2010
- The plan is to update it accordingly for ICSEA 2010
- Location: yet to be defined, most probably in Nice, France
- ICSEA 2010 will be organized under SoftNet 2010, most probably in August 2010
Long-Term Perspective of Agile Methods
Summary of the panel
This panel discussed the long-term perspective of the agile methods. According to the majority of the panelists, many of the practices inherent in the family of agile methods are not new. They have already existed in the traditional heavyweight methods. They represent many of the of software development best practices that have evolved within the five decades of software development. The novelty of agile methods lies in their adaptivity to continuous business changes and people-orientation. Both positive and negative sides were mentioned during the panel. Regarding the positive sides, there was a common agreement among the panelists that agile methods impose high degree of team discipline based on simple and effective rules and that they introduce transparency between the customer and development teams thus leading better requirements fulfillment. Regarding the negative sides, issues that were raised mainly concerned documentation, replacement of requirements with user stories, and focus on short-term goals, instead of the long-term ones. Finally, the panelists and the audience commonly agreed that agile methods, just as any other hype methods, have come; however, they will go. Hopefully, they will contribute to new set of practices that will be useful in the future hypes to come.
Prof. Dr. Mira Kajko-Mattsson
Stockholm University & Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
