Biography
David M. Weiss
Director, Software Technology Research, Avaya Labs
 David M. Weiss received the B.S. degree in Mathematics in 1964 from Union College, and the M.S. in Computer Science in 1974 and the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981 from the University of Maryland. He is currently the head of the Software Technology Research Department at Avaya Laboratories, and is looking into the problem of how to improve the effectiveness of software development in general and of Avaya's software development processes in particular. In this capacity he heads the Avaya Resource Center for Software Technology.
Previously he was the Director of the Software Production Research Department at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories, which conducted research on how to improve the effectiveness of software development. Before joining Bell Labs, he was Director of the Reuse and Measurement Department of the Software Productivity Consortium (SPC), a consortium of 14 large U.S. aerospace companies. Prior to joining SPC Dr. Weiss spent a year at the Office of Technology Assessment, where he was co-author of a technology assessment of the Strategic Defense Initiative. During the 1985-1986 academic year he was a visiting scholar at The Wang Institute and for many years was a researcher at the Computer Science and Systems Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in Washington, D.C. He has also worked as a programmer and as a mathematician. He is also a senior member of the IEEE and associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
Dr. Weiss's principal research interests are in the area of software engineering, particularly in software development processes and methodologies, software design, and software measurement. He is best known for his invention of the goal-question-metric approach to software measurement, his work on the modular structure of software systems, and his work in software product-line engineering as a co-inventor of the Synthesis process, and its successor the FAST process. He is co-author and co-editor of two books: Software Product Line Engineering and Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers of David L. Parnas.
Presentation
Software product line engineering is becoming a more prevalent approach across industry. The goals, as with other approaches to improving software development, are to improve the time to create new products, reduce the cost of creating new products, improve the quality of products, and improve a development organization's ability to tailor its products to changing customer needs. Product LIne Engineering (PLE), the process for creating product lines, is based on the assumption that narrowing the domain of interest leads to efficiency in software production by enabling reuse of requirements, architecture, components, and other workproducts. Over the last 10 years or so we have gone from systematically engineering small domains to engineering large, industrial product lines. This talk will briefly present the main ideas and justification underlying PLE, give a brief overview of some industry experience, and discuss the issues involved in large-scale PLE. I will end with a proposal for a new approach to organizing software development, called open market software development, that is intended to improve both developer motivation and organizational efficiency within the context of PLE and other re-use based software development.
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Rob van Ommering graduated in Physics at the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1982. He then joined Philips Research, where he worked on robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Part of this time he lived in Redhill, England. In 1998 he transferred to the Philips Center for Software Technology, where he applied formal specification techniques to industrial applications. In 1993 he transferred back to Philips Research, where he started working on software architecture formalization, verification and visualization, using relation partition algebra.