Software Engeering Research Papers

Xiangyu Zhang, 2008/09/17 10:46 Today Mussabek presented a paper regarding program annotations (comments). What interested me quite a bit is the way the paper was written. It records the result of surveys and interviews. In fact, when you read the ICSE proceedings, you can see papers that vary significantly. Some are very formal and technical, some are very practical like today's paper. The fact that this paper is not technical does not mean it is not a good paper. Industry likes such papers because they provide guidance to improve their development process, which means money. Training our students for such thinking is equally important as training them with program analysis, type system, etc. Unfortunately, as a computer science graduate student, it is hard to image one can graduate with a Ph.D degree with such papers (please search on the web for the dissertations of those recently graduated Ph.D students in SE). Furthermore, most graduate students lack the resources to conduct the required surveys and interviews.