Welcome from the Con. Gen Chair
FoSE Interview
Window on the World
Issue 1
The Future of Software Engineering– An Interview with Anthony Finkelstein
By Will Tracz
By now some of you may have noticed a welcome addition to the conference proceedings. At the reception Tuesday night, this reporter caught up with Anthony Finkelstein, the editor and contributor to this landmark volume, to ask him a few probing questions.
Q. Where did you get the idea for this volume?
The idea for this is really a combination of a number of different things: we wanted to do something for the millennium, we knew that the state-of-the-art sessions have always been popular sessions at ICSE, and finally, we wanted to have a special book for the year 2000.
Q. Why did you create the volume?
I started out as the chairman for the State of the Art Reports for ICSE 2000 and, you know what happens in ICSE, I had a burst of eccentric creativity and this is the result. Also, I should point out that Carlo Ghezzi assisted me in the inception of the volume.
Q. Did you have any troubles editing the issue?
No, people on the whole were very enthusiastic about contributing to the issue and thought they could dash something off quickly, but that usually was not the case. They enjoyed it even though it took them a lot longer than they thought. Also there are a few gaps in the coverage (e.g., AI and Reuse) as some people dropped out at the last minute. Finally, in my opinion I admit that I forgot to have a section on “professionalism,” which seems to be getting a lot of attention lately.
Q: Why do you think people should attend the presentations?
I think there will be a lot of controversy raised by the presentations. A lot of sacred cows will be slaughtered when they present the parts of the roadmap on what will not be part of the future … what will be killed.
Q: When do you think an update of this book should be done?
I think 5-7 years would be the right sort of time.
Q: What did you learn from this experience?
One thing I learned is that one should not be afraid to ask oneself “What are the ‘big’ questions in my field?” I looked at my own field and had to reflect. “Am I asking the right questions? Ones that will move the field in the right direction?”
Q: What else did you learn?
I learned that PDF has some unusual properties. Also about the power of prepositions-- the interesting different interpretations of software engineering “with” (fill in the blank), software engineering for (fill in the blank), and (fill in the blank) and software engineering all lead to different conclusions.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to say?
I would like to encourage the readers to go to the web site we have set up for this volume (http://www.softwaresystems.org/future.html). It contains presentations associated with this track and links to other interesting information.
Designer
and Webmistress
Caroline Kehoe