On Tuesday 26 September I got back from Rio de Janeiro, after having attended ISERN (a research network), IASESE (a school), and ISESE (a conference). A full week of empirical software engineering goodness, but sadly not much spare time to look around Rio.
ISESE (the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering) was the main reason I was there. I presented a paper Evaluating Guidelines for Empirical Software Engineering Studies, which was about how we evaluated a proposed set of guidelines for reporting controlled experiments in software engineering. I was one of 10 (!) authors. We used a perspective-based reading approach to review the guidelines from the perspectives of various kinds of stakeholders (Researchers, Reviewers, Replicators, Meta-Analysts, Practioner/Consultants, Authors). We expressed the needs of the stakeholders as questions about papers that we imagined had been written using the guidelines.
My last full day in Rio was almost too exciting – in the morning Emilia Mendes and I did a tag-team presentation of Maggie Wojcicki’s paper (Maggie had lost her voice on the flight to Rio), in the afternoon both (coincidentally) my paper and Emilia’s won distinguished paper awards at the conference, and then after a few rounds of volleyball on the beach, I got to do a bit of surf lifesaving when a student got caught in a rip. Luckily a local swam out to help with the rescue – I assisted for a while, but by the end of it all I was just rescuing myself. Everyone was OK.