Seminar by Michalis Famelis (University of Toronto)

Speaker: Michalis Famelis
                University of Toronto

Title: Managing Uncertainty in Software Engineering

Date: Thursday, February 26th, 2015

Time: 10:30AM - 12PM

Place: EV3.309

ABSTRACT

The concern for handling uncertainty pervades contemporary software engineering. In its presence, the best developer teams are those that are experts at keeping possible options open, juggling multiple design alternatives, and avoiding premature commitments. However, existing tools, languages and methodologies rarely, if ever, take uncertainty into account.

I will present a formal but practical framework that supports deferring design decisions while uncertainty persists, allowing development and analysis to continue. This requires drawing from diverse areas of software engineering to create novel abstractions, notations and automation approaches to seamlessly "lift" existing operations to correctly and efficiently handle sets of possibilities.

These techniques have enabled contributions in Industrial Product Line Engineering and Software Quality. Potential directions for future synergies include areas such as Business Intelligence, Requirements Engineering, and Language Workbenches.

BIO

Michalis Famelis is a graduating PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, working under the Supervision of Marsha Chechik. He is interested in the engineering of complex socio-technical systems, seen through the lens of software.  His work on the management of design-time uncertainty combines formal, practical and collaborative aspects of software engineering research, earning the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in 2012.