Recent Conference participation by Steven Fraser
ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering)
https://www.icse-conferences.org/
SPLASH (International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity)
https://www.sigplan.org/Conferences/SPLASH/
XP (International Conference on Agile Software Development)
https://conf.researchr.org/home/xp-2026
The Future of Software Engineering Beyond the Hype of AI
ICSE’25, Ottawa, Canada
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3743095.3743102
ACM/IEEE ICSE 2025, the world's premiere software engineering conference, celebrated its 50th year. To mark the occasion, a panel of academics and practitioners was convened to discuss the future of software engineering. The panelists shared their views of how software engineering jobs will change, how software will continue to have an impact on society, and whether AI could be trusted to create secure software. The panel was organized and moderated by Steven Fraser (Innoxec) and Dennis Mancl (MSWX Software Experts). Panelists included Adriana Meza Soria (MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab), Landon Noll (Independent), Tom DeMarco (The Atlantic Systems Guild), Laurie Williams (North Carolina State), Mary Shaw (Carnegie Mellon), Irene Manotas (IBM), and Bertrand Meyer (Eiffel Software).
Documenting and Communicating Design Decisions
ICSE’25, Ottawa, Canada
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11029563
Design is both a human and a technical endeavor. Documenting and communicating design decisions remains challenging. Lightweight graphical models, text, and design focused unit tests help. However, whether trying to understand the software output of an AI-aided design tool or reusing software components developed by others - documentation, collaboration, and communication remain key to understanding and propagating design decisions.
Investing in Software Design – From Technology to Culture:
How Collaboration and Communication Matter
ICSE’24, Lisbon, Portugal
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10669892
Companies that design, develop, and deploy software products at scale face a learning gap. To be effective, software developers need to continuously conceptualize, collaborate, and communicate – to share and learn from each other. To sustain a competitive edge, companies need to invest in collaborative learning. Recommended investments include a mix of education and collaboration programs to share design ideas: for example, internal conferences, facilitated workshops, subject matter knowledge networks, and talent exchanges. In this experience report, we outline strategies that reflect the authors’ experiences from software product organizations spanning multiple development centers across six continents.
Innovating Software Solutions – Past, Present, and Future
XP’24, Bolzano, Italy
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-72781-8_30
Software practitioners have adopted many new ways of working over the past 25 years. Change has been driven by a diverse and global community of users, practitioners, researchers, and vernacular programmers. What have we learned over the past 25 years? What skills will software researchers and practitioners need in the future? Will AI or other emerging technologies offer opportunities for greater achievements, or will they become an obstacle to the human touch needed to develop software products?
Virtual and the Future of Conferences
Paper in the Communications of the ACM, January 2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3624638
During the COVID-19 pandemic, conferences quickly transitioned to virtual. Based on our own virtual conference experiences and a survey we conducted in spring 2022, we see virtual conferences increased attendee access by reducing costs and travel time. However, the overall virtual conference experience during COVID was disappointing for some conferees. While technology and social norms will take time to evolve, we believe conference attendees should have a choice that includes virtual.
Software Innovation through Collaboration and Diversity
McGill University School of Computer Science, Sept. 29, 2023,
http://cs.mcgill.edu/events/314/
Innovation, collaboration, and diversity are three key factors in delivering valued software in the 21st century. Today's products, services, and entertainment systems (streaming, gaming) rely on high quality software, and each of the three factors play an important role. Innovation delivers value to developers and users - whether the innovation is open or proprietary, sustaining or disruptive. Collaboration brings ideas and people together. Diversity in approach, practice, design, and discipline improves resilience and mitigates risks. A recipe for innovation success includes strategies for collaboration and embracing diversity. This talk will conclude with a summary of experiences and examples spanning multiple software application domains.
Exploring Dimensions of University-Company Collaborations:
Accelerating Innovation through Tech Transfer
HTW Berlin - University of Applied Sciences
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Five knowledge transfer strategies, developed over a period of 25 years at four Global 1000 companies (HP, Cisco, Qualcomm, and Nortel), are described in the context of mitigating R&D challenges associated with duplicated effort, product quality, and time-to-market. These strategies continue to be refined and applied at Innoxec. The five strategies accelerate innovation through knowledge sharing, in contrast to licensing tangible intellectual property rights (IPR) such as patents, trade secrets, and copyrights. The five strategies are based on corporate tech forums, conference panels, exploratory workshops, research reviews (at universities and companies), and talent exchanges. These strategies accelerate company innovation, by incubating cross-company R&D collaborations, capturing organizational memory, cultivating and leveraging external research partnerships, and feeding company talent pipelines.
Software Profession Dimensions of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
SPLASH’22, Auckland, New Zealand
http://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587062.3587068
Principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are important across academia, industry, and government, yet progress has been uneven. As individuals, we tend to evaluate others in terms of our own norms, beliefs, and standards. We also tend to find comfort in likeness. History has demonstrated that it is difficult to share power and the faces on organization charts often don’t change with any regularity. Change also encounters political obstacles, particularly when relying solely on “representationalism” to increase diversity. Dimensions of DEI tend to fall into two categories. Some dimensions are visible characteristics - age, color, gender, and physical ability. But others are less visible - education, ethnicity, experience, gender identity, heritage, language, national origin, occupation, political beliefs, mental ability, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, veteran status, etc. An understanding of the past can help us understand how DEI efforts have fallen short or failed.
The software profession benefits from diversity and inclusion because the community is challenged by situations requiring a multi-disciplinary approach. Effective software solutions often involve a blend of techniques and practices drawn from business, engineering, government, science, and the social sciences. End-user stakeholders are diverse and may include aviators, bankers, doctors, educators, engineers, government officials, and scientists. Without DEI, lives and economies can be at stake. While many practitioners may lack a formal education in software or computer science, DEI principles and their adoption remain relevant to all.
This Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) Conference panel reflected on the questions that need be addressed to foster the adoption of DEI principles by individuals, organizations, and communities as the software field continues to grow.
The Future of Work: Agile in a Hybrid World
XP’22, Copenhagen, Denmark
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-48550-3_7
An agile organization adapts what they are building to match their customer’s evolving needs. Agile teams also adapt to changes in their organization’s work environment. The latest change is the evolving environment of “hybrid ” work – a mix of in-person and virtual staff. Team members might sometimes work together in the office, work from home, or work in other locations, and they may struggle to sustain a high level of collaboration and innovation. It isn’t just pandemic social distancing – many of us want to work from home to eliminate our commute and spend more time with family. Are there learnings and best practices that organizations can use to become and stay effective in a “hybrid” world?
Five Strategies for the Future of Work:
Accelerating Innovation through Tech Transfer
Virtual XP’21
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01764
This experience report outlines five tech transfer strategies that I developed over a period of 25 years at four Global 1000 companies (HP, Cisco, Qualcomm, and Nortel) to mitigate R&D challenges associated with duplicated effort, product quality, and time-to-market. I continue to refine and use these strategies as an Innoxec consultant. My five strategies accelerate innovation through knowledge sharing, rather than through creating and licensing tangible intellectual property rights (IPR) such as patents, trade secrets, and copyrights. These five strategies are based on corporate tech forums, conference panels, exploratory workshops, research reviews (at universities and companies), and talent exchanges. My initial objective was to foster corporate adoption of software best practices, but I discovered over time that these strategies had broader impact on company innovation, including incubating cross-company R&D collaborations, capturing organizational memory, cultivating and leveraging external research partnerships, and feeding company talent pipelines.
Exploring the Dimensions of University-Company Collaborations:
Research, Talent, and Beyond
Virtual ICSE’21
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9474829
The paper and presentation explored the benefits of university-company collaborations beyond research and talent – primarily from a US and Canadian perspective. Company connections to specific universities may initially be based on research relationships or talent acquisition needs. Additional collaborative dimensions may include marketing, sales, public policy, local economic development, and philanthropy. University-company partnerships are complex and fragile. To build effective and enduring partnerships, we describe collaboration scenarios to: incubate collaborations, connect experts, assess and communicate collaborative value, and grow relationships. Our talk (and paper) presents a set of recommended activities to achieve a greater sustained impact for innovation and learning: orchestrate collaborative events, measure and track results, facilitate learning, catalyze research through philanthropy, leverage regional development and government incentives, incubate a collaborative ecosystem, and make collaboration results more visible and actionable.
Presentation available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewgUaK0IgWg
Virtual Collaboration Techniques to Catalyze Open Innovation
McGill University School of Computer Science Seminar
November 13, 2021.
As we face the challenges of pandemic-enforced separation, now more than ever, effective strategies for open innovation and collaboration “at a distance” are essential for software industry professionals. This seminar will focus on the strategies and benefits for collaborative open innovation by both companies and universities. For companies, university relations programs are a way to expand a company's ability to innovate, calibrate its research in emerging technologies, leverage government incentive programs, and build visibility for the company's brand. For universities, an open innovation collaboration model is a great way to connect researchers, students, and administrators with companies. University research collaboration goals often include attracting new funding, understanding real-world challenges to evolve curricula, networking to foster increased research excellence, and cultivating employment opportunities for graduates. Leveraging 25+ years of multi-site R&D, virtual collaboration forums, and university relations experience at Nortel, Qualcomm, Cisco, HP, and Innoxec – Steven Fraser will explore strategies, collaboration techniques, benefits, and potential challenges for open innovation. The seminar will conclude with a summary of “best case,” “worst case,” and “most likely case” company-university collaboration scenarios.
2021 Strategies for “Socially Distant” University-Company Collaborations
Virtual ICSE’21
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9474828
In the early months of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly transformed the way the world works and collaborates. With all work-related travel abruptly curtailed and most company professionals and academics working from home, the daily work environment shifted to an ecosystem enabled by online communication and collaboration tools. In 2021, workflows continue to evolve for both universities and corporations – to better support R&D, education, and ideation. This panel will discuss how COVID-19-inspired innovation ecosystems have changed – for better or worse – university-company collaborations. Panelists will share personal observations, challenges, results, and ideas for the future.
COVID-19's Influence on the Future of Agile
XP’20, Virtual, Copenhagen
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-58858-8_32
As a result of the global COVID-19 Pandemic, the way we work, collaborate, and live has changed dramatically. Many of us are currently “working from home” in quarantine to reduce our pandemic exposure and the risk of infection for our colleagues and families. Collaboration is increasingly facilitated by a variety of internet-based tools – substituting screens for face-to-face interactions. How do does this impact our productivity and the future of Agile?
