David Notkin
Location: (Seattle, WA)
Personal Research Web Page: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/notkin
Keywords: software evolution, software maintenance, software resting and analysis, software design, software tools and environments, software configurations, multicore for software quality
Posted on: Saturday, May 16th, 2009
Broad Research Area: Software Engineering
Research Interests:
My research interests are in software engineering, with a particular focus in software evolution: understanding why software is so hard and expensive to change, and in turn reducing those difficulties and costs.
The ability to change software — that is, the “softness” of software — is where its true power resides. Complaining about the difficulty and cost of changing software is reasonable because we need to continue to improve. It is simultaneously unreasonable because there is no medium that is easier to change; software often changes precisely because it is far more costly to change systems in which software is embedded and/or hardware upon which software runs. At the very least, some rational objectives should underlie these complaints: for example, what relative and absolute costs are acceptable for software testing? for software maintenance? etc.?
I pursue an agenda set by my interests and biases along with those of my colleagues, students and post-docs. They generally address “what is unnecessarily difficult and costly in software engineering?” Historical examples, and some current ideas, can be found on my web page.
