Summer Plans: Research Project 1

For an academic, summer really starts when the marks are all submitted after the end of classes. So, my summer has already started. In fact I’m two months in (almost half-way). This is not a comforting thought. There was (is) so much I want to (need to) do this summer.

I started by (finally) writing up the service science research landscape I blogged about last year. It has been submitted as a book chapter to the theme: “Service Systems Implementation”, a Volume in “Service Science: Research and Innovations (SSRI) in the Service Economy” Book Series, Springer.

I’m also working on three fun research projects with smart people this summer. I will briefly introduce each of them in the next few posts.

The first is a project on the decision-making needs of future knowledge-workers. I’m working with PhD student John Peco in the Faculty of Information who is studying how young people use social networking sites and other online tools to help them engage with information and people for decision-making. A survey will be out soon to help us learn more. I'm also working with soon-to-be masters student in Computer Science, Fan Dong, who is looking into collaborative decision making in cross-site software engineering groups. Fan is conducting a literature review looking at research into what are key decisions that are made in software engineering, how those decisions are made (in what ways using what methods), when various decisions are made (at what stages of software engineering), with whom (when / why do they engage with others) and using which tools or models.

Fan and I are also compiling a list of the kinds of decisions that are made during a software development effort, whether during design and requirements gathering, coding, testing, release planning, deployment, configuration, maintenance, etc.

So, my question to all the software people out there is:

What are some of the decisions you make (or made) in your software development work?

Please respond as comments to this post or to me directly and I’ll summarize and post back.