ICSE2000: Window on the World - Issue 2

The SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award was awarded to Victor R. Basili, Professor, Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering, Maryland. It was pointed out during the session that Vic has authored or co-authored far and away more papers in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering than anyone else. He has long been an advocate, and indeed structured his career around, empirical software engineering research.

During his acceptance speech, he broke his work up into three categories that answer three different questions:

1) Can we measure and differentiate products and processes?

2) Can we improve the product?

3) Can we improve the process?

Although the categories are ordered in the time Vic's work in them began, none of the categories have ended, and ongoing work is still being done in all three.

His career started with the first question, which really provides the bedrock for the next two. Once an affirmative answer was obtained that they could indeed measure important differences, then ways of improving products could be devised and empirically tested. Finally, when improved products are being constructed, then the next level becomes important, which is improving the process. It seems to me that working toward efficient processes producing quality products is a noble achievement and something to be proud of.

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