Foundations of Empirical Software Engineering

Legacy of Victor R. Basili

Monday, May 16, 2005

Although software engineering can trace its beginning to a NATO conference in 1968, it cannot be said to have become an empirical science until the 1970s with the advent of work of Professor Victor R. Basili of the University of Maryland. In addition to the need for engineering software was the need to understand software as well as its developing processes, techniques, methods and tools. Much like other sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, software engineering needed a discipline of observation, theory formation, experimentation and feedback. By applying the scientific method to the software engineering domain, Vic Basili developed concepts like the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement paradigm, and the Experience-Factory approach to help bring a sense of order to the ad-hoc development so prevalent in the software engineering field.

On the occasion of Vic Basili's 65th birthday, we hold this symposium summarizing and reflecting on his collected work. In six sessions we will cover his contributions to the following areas of software engineering research

> Formal languages & formal methods
> Measurement
> Software Engineering Laboratory
> Learning organizations & experience factory
> Technical developments and empirical studies
> Experience bases

Each session will be summarized by a leading expert who has worked with Vic Basili in the past. This collected body of work has incrementally led to the establishment of the discipline of “experimental software engineering”. In that the symposium will be interesting to people who have followed Vic Basili’s work more or less closely in the past, but also to young researchers who can learn from his profound and thorough research methods in order to model their own careers.

Symposium proceedings: Foundations of Empirical Software Engineering: The Legacy of Victor R. Basili, editied by Barry Boehm, Dieter Rombach, and Marvin Zelkowitz, containing 20 of Basili's more important papers, has been published by Springer. ISBN is 3-540-24547-2.

ATTENDEES PROGRAM (Pictures from Symposium) $
9:00	Welcome	Barry Boehm, Chair
	Introduction and summary of Vic Basili’s biography
9:45-16:45	Technical Presentations	Dieter Rombach, chair
	1. Formal languages & formal methods	Ali Mili, New Jersey Institute of Technology
10:30-11:00 break
	2. Measurement	Lionel Briand, Carleton University
	3. Software Engineering Laboratory	Michael A. Cusumano, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
12:30-14:00 lunch
	4. Learning organizations & experience factory	Jyrki Kontio, Helsinki University of Technology
	5. Technical developments & empirical studies	Forrest Shull, Fraunhofer Center, Maryland
15:30-16:00 break
	6. Experience bases	Ross Jeffery, University of New South Wales
16:45	Vic Basili responds	Marv Zelkowitz, chair
	Current research	Victor Basili, University of Maryland
17:45 Symposium ends
18:30	Dinner	Carmine’s Steak House 20 South Fourth Street St. Louis