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:

Miscellaneous:


Personal:

Born and raised in the area of Groningen, The Netherlands, I nowadays run my own business Fluxica in Finland. Fluxica develops data analysis applications and performs software architecture consultancy projects. I started Fluxica in early 2006 while working at VTT as a tenured senior research scientist. Before moving to Finland in late 2004, I was a Ph.D. 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 thesis is: well, see above. Click here for my LinkedIn profile.

Prior to my Ph.D studies I worked at ASML as a software engineer (secondment by High Tech Automation) for about one year. It was then that I encountered some very challenging software engineering problems that seemed to have at least one question in common: what makes software engineering theory relevant in the context of everyday software engineering practice? Just theory is often good but not good enough in software engineering research, the reality of developing a system is often far more complex than anticipated due to many reasons. One of these reasons being, and arguably the most important reason, the way how the human mind works. One of the first questions to ask yourself as a researcher/software practitioner: does the theory such as, e.g., a modeling language, represent the system you are developing, or does it represent the system you want to develop?

One of the main problems in software engineering is that the problems that are said to appear during software development are typically symptoms rather than problems (indeed, this is funny). Software architects and researchers alike should ask themselves, what is the cause or causes of these symptoms? Does it make sense to work on a symptom rather than its cause?

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). 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!

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