Michel Jaring's Home Page

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."
~ Isaac Asimov

Hello and welcome! This web page hosts my papers on variability in software product family engineering. Being an advocate of case study research in cooperation with industry, most of the papers include a case study of quantitative nature for exploratory and validation purposes. After all, software engineering research becomes really interesting, or funny actually, when theoretical significance has practical relevance.


Selected Publications:

Ph.D. Thesis:

Journals:

Conferences:

Workshops:


Where Did My Process Start?

I was born and raised in the area of Groningen, The Netherlands, an area is rooted in Frisia. Nowadays I work as a so-called tutkijatohtori (department funded) at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Before joining the university, I worked at VTT for three years as a tenured senior research scientist after moving to Oulu, Finland, in early 2005. I was for four years, until late 2004, a doctoral student in Software Engineering at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. The Software Engineering and ARCHitecture research group (SEARCH) in Groningen was back then headed by my advisor prof. dr. ir. Jan Bosch. The title of my dissertation is: well, see above.

Prior to my doctoral studies I worked at ASML as a software engineer (secondment by High Tech Automation) for one year. It was then that I encountered some very challenging software engineering problems that made me ask myself: what makes software engineering theory relevant in the context of everyday software engineering practice?

My current research focuses on dynamically reconfigurable software product family architectures; the goal is to combine the principles of software and hardware into a single concept (for the connoisseur: the flexibility of software and the performance of a hard-wired implementation). More specifically, I am interested in how dynamically reconfigurable software product families relate to software system aspects such as variability, testability and parallelizability.

Doing research has been a great career choice; it is just plain interesting and has given me the opportunity to travel around the world. It was also through a research exchange that I met my wife Päivi. And yes, in the context of product family research in practice, Elise was born in June 2006 and since variability is a Good ThingTM, Fernand came along in August 2007 and Sophie started her process in March 2010!

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