Special Seminar: Emilia Mendes " Cost-based decision-making is dead, long live Value-based decision-making!"

Department of Computer Science

6.2.2018 at 13:00, TUAS 1021-1022

Professor Emilia Mendes

Title: Cost-based decision-making is dead, long live Value-based decision-making!

Abstract:

Evidence shows that to remain competitive, innovative and to grow, companies must change from cost-based to value-based decision-making where the decisions taken are the best for that company’s overall value creation. Fourteen years ago, Barry Boehm argued for the same change to occur within the context of Software Engineering research and practice, and set the agenda for a new research area called Value-Based Software Engineering.

To date more than 100 VBSE research papers and some books have been published; however VBSE still presents many research gaps that should be investigated. One of which is the use of software tools to support and improve VBSE decision-making, which has received to date very small attention; another one relates to a detailed understanding about what value means to key stakeholders participating in some of the most crucial activities in the context of product management – release planning and product road mapping. Finally, there is hardly any research on value estimation, despite evidence in other fields about the advantages that good prediction models can bring to decision-makers. 

The core aim of this talk is to discuss some of my future research goals, all focused upon VBSE, and directly related to the three research gaps abovementioned. However, I will also present past and current research that serve as basis for my future VBSE research.

Bio:

Emilia Mendes is Full Professor in Computer Science at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden), and also Distinguished Finnish Professor at the University of Oulu (Finland). She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (UK) in 1999, and then initiated her full time academic career at the Computer Science Department at the University of Auckland (NZ), where she worked for 12 years. After leaving NZ, and prior to moving to Sweden, she was Associate Professor at Zayed University (UAE) for a year. Her main research contributions were made to date in the application of machine learning techniques to Web and software effort estimation, and more recently to value estimation; however, she also carries out research in collaboration with colleagues and via the supervision of PhD students, in a wider spectrum of research topics (e.g. value-based decision making, software process improvement, personality in software development teams, computer science education, machine learning applied to healthcare). Overall, she has authored/co-authored over 200 research papers at international journal & conference, with seven best paper awards to date (2 at ESEM).  She is the co-editor of a book (2005 - Web Engineering) and sole author of two books (2007 - Cost Estimation Techniques for Web Projects; 2014 – Practitioner’s Knowledge Representation: a pathway to improve software effort estimation). She is in the editorial board of several journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and the Software Quality Journal. Finally, she worked in the ICT industry for ten years as programmer, business analyst and project manager prior to moving to the UK in the end of 1995 to initiate her PhD studies.