Prof. Magne Jørgensen
Chief Research Scientist at Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
Professor, University of Oslo

Prof. Magne Jørgensen works as a researcher at Simula Research Laboratory and a professor at the University of Oslo. Previously, he worked with software development, estimation, and process improvement in the telecom and insurance industry. He together with Prof. Kitchenham and Dr Dybå has founded and promoted evidence-based software engineering and teaches this to students and software professionals. In 2014, he received the ACM Sigsoft award for most influential paper last ten years for his work on evidence-based software engineering. He has published more than 60 journal papers in software engineering, psychology, forecasting and project management.

TOPIC: FROM FASHION-BASED TO EVIDENCE-BASED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: CAN IT BE MADE?

Abstract:
An evidence-based software professional is one who is able to: 1) Formulate a question, related to a decision or judgment, so that it can be answered by the use of evidence, 2) Collect, critically evaluate and summarize relevant evidence from research, practice and local studies/experiments, 3) Apply the evidence, integrated with knowledge about the local context, to guide decisions and judgments. The keynote addresses what it in practice means to be evidence-based in software engineering contexts, where the number of different contexts is high and the research-based evidence sparse, and why there is a need for more evidence-based practices. It summarizes the experience from more than ten years of training software engineers in evidence-based practices, from studies on how software companies succeed and fails in learning from their own and other companies' practice-based experience and how some companies use experimenting to create local evidence. While there are challenges related to evidence-based practices, we find that it is feasible and sometimes make an important difference in terms of quality of software engineering judgment and decisions. Based on our experience we suggest changes in how evidence-based software engineering should be taught, and how to increase the ability and use of evidence-based practices.