Things Software

I am a software engineering researcher and consultant based in Ottawa, Canada. My expertise lies in software development practices, software project management, software quality and measurement, project evaluation, quantitative decision-making, and the economics of software development. I have been involved in the agile software development community since 2001.  I was program co-chair of XP/Agile Universe in 2004, and am the general chair of XP 2010 to be held in Trondheim, Norway. I served as general chair of Agile 2011 from August to November, 2010.

I have 16 years of post-graduate experience working on software engineering processes and quantitative techniques with industrial and academic partners. I have lectured on a diverse set of topics pertaining to software process, quality, and economics.

I hold an adjunct faculty appointment at the University of Calgary’s Department of Computer Science, where I occasionally teach graduate courses. From January 2007 t0 December 2010, I served as the Editor in Chief of IEEE Software, where I wrote a regular column. I am also an affiliate faculty member in the Bogaziçi University Computer Engineering Department‘s Software Research Laboratory. From October 2o11 to January 2012, I was a visiting scholar at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, funded through the European Union’s Erasmus Mundus Program which promotes higher education excellence.

From January 1995 to June 2009, I worked for  the Canadian National Research Council‘s Institute for Information Technology, a federal government research laboratory. From 2002 to 2009, I led the Agile and Collaborative Practices and Software Economics research threads in the Software Engineering Group. Before joining NRC, I worked at INRS-Télécommunications, Montreal, for a year as a research associate advancing and applying my PhD work on the validation and synthesis of communication protocols.

I co-edited two software engineering books, Advances in Software Engineering: Comprehension, Evaluation and Evolutionand Value-Based Software Engineering, both published by Springer.

I obtained my PhD degree in Telecommunications in 1994 from Université du Québec’s  Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS). I hold a MSc degree from McGill University‘s School of Computer Science in Montreal, Canada (1989) and a BSc degree from Bogaziçi University‘s Computer Engineering Department in Istanbul, Turkey (1986).

I am a member of IEEE (Senior Member), IEEE Computer Society, and ACM.  I am a member-elect (2012-2014) of IEEE Computer Society’s Board of Governors and a member of its Publications Board. My company is a member of the International Software Engineering Research Network (ISERN).