Prof. Emilia Mendes
Professor in Software Engineering
Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden

Prof. Emilia Mendes Professor in Software Engineering at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden). She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (UK) in 1999, and then initiated her full time academic career at the Computer Science Department at the University of Auckland (NZ), where she worked for 12 years. After leaving NZ, and prior to moving to Sweden, she was Associate Professor at Zayed University (UAE) for a year. Her research is inter-disciplinary, encompassing four disciplines – Computer Science, Empirical Software & Web Engineering, IT/Computer Science & Software/Web Engineering education, and Hypertext. To date she has published over 200 refereed publications, which include three books - one edited (2005 - Web Engineering) and two authored (2007 - Cost Estimation Techniques for Web Projects; 2014 – Practitioner's Knowledge Representation: a pathway to improve software effort estimation). She worked in the ICT industry for ten years as programmer, business analyst and project manager prior to moving to the UK in the end of 1995 to initiate her PhD studies.

TOPIC: PREDICTING THE OVERALL VALUE OF DECISIONS RELATING TO SOFTWARE PRODUCT/PROJECT

Abstract:
In today's cutthroat product and services industries, software has become the main driver for competitive advantage, enabling faster and cheaper innovation and product differentiation with no domain restriction. As the size and complexity of software-based solutions increase, so does the impact of software development decisions on the overall product offering. That is, any decision taken regarding software product/project management and development (e.g. what features to design, what level of quality to offer, or which technology to choose) will impact the entire product's/project's life cycle and value, not to mention that it limits future possibilities and direction of both the software and the business.

Numerous companies worldwide deliver software intensive products and services. One of their major challenges is caused by most often taking product/project management decisions considering only the short-term costs (cost estimates) while ignoring long-term value aspects for the business, for example sustainability and innovation. To sustain growth, maintain competitive advantage and to innovate, such companies must make a paradigm shift by also adopting long-term value aspects in order to guide their decision-making. Such need is clearly pressing in innovative industries, such as ICT and Digital Services.

The goal of this talk is to present a value-based software engineering framework that enables companies to co-create prediction models to provide estimates of the overall value of decision scenarios relating to software product/project management within the domains of ICT and digital services, and "what-if" scenarios that can be compared and contrasted, thus enabling better decision-making and contributing to enhanced decision makers' mental models (tacit knowledge).