The SEN symposium in Amsterdam is a yearly event that gathers software engineering researchers and practitioners. This year I was invited to give a talk along several great speakers including: Felienne Hermans, Andreas Zeller, Marielle Stoelinga, and Hans Wanders the CIO (!) of the Netherlands.
I started my talk observing that Google, Facebook, and Twitter are using context in order to provide us with the best… ads! I then argued that in software analytics we can use context in order to create more powerful tools and analyses.
In particular I discussed three types of context that I have experienced with in my work:
- The Temporal context allows us to replay the evolution of the system to better understand it
- The (eco)Systemic context allows us to understand a system in the broader context in which it interacts with other systems
- The Personal context allows our analytics tools to become “intimate supplements of the human mind” (Vannevar Bush)
A Fun Audience
The organizers have provided the participants with voting cards: yellow and red. This is a nice idea, since you can interact with the audience in a more interactive manner.
At some point, I took a picture of the audiencve after I asked them to lift their red cards if they prefer to read War and Peace and the yellow cards if they’d prefer to read the source code of ArgoUML.
Looking at the three yellow cards, it seems that in the audience there were three people who have already read War and Peace :)