ICGSE conference

The ICGSE conference (International Conference on Global Software Engineering – http://www.icgse.org/) took place at the IIITB (International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, http://www.iiitb.ac.in/) in the Electronic City Area of Bangalore. We were just one street away from Infosys, Siemens, Wipro… all the famous IT companies…

Conference was quiet interesting – not a big crowd but nice and dedicated people. The countries that were represented were: Ireland (high), India (medium), Germany (high), US (low)… France is absent from the GSD research field! Lots of people are using students for studies but there is a need of looking more at the industry practices.

Got some references that I need to study further… The talks I preferred were on the use of Scrum in a distributed setting and the experience report from Siemens on a project involving students in Brazil, the US and Italy. The keynotes were also well chosen with a talk from the president of CSC (K. Subrahmaniam) on the differences between software development and manufacturing, innovation in India (Deependra Moitra) and virtual collaborations (Thomas A. Finholt). One of the talks I would have loved to hear about is the one of the possible use of Wonderland (the virtual world from Sun) in GSD – the speaker was not present.

The conference reception introduced us to the traditional dance in India. The interest was that the dancers mixed traditional Indian prayana with some modern moves.

Our GSD talk was at the end of the conference in the Education track. The talk was very well appreciated – with a thumb up from some people and congratulations from Indian and Irish researchers. What we are doing with my colleagues is both doing GSD and studying it. That is the plus! When doing the GSD project I really feel like a project manager…