Hans Christian Benestad defends his PhD thesis
On Tuesday 30 June, Hans Christian Benestad successfully defended his PhD thesis Empirical Assessment of Cost Factors and Productivity during Software Evolution through the Analysis of Software Change Effort.
Hans Christian Benestad
Changes and improvements to existing software can generate large benefits to its users and to society as a whole, but can also be costly. In his PhD thesis, Benestad identifies factors that affect the effort required by developers to maintain and evolve software, and proposes countermeasures based on these findings. Furthermore, to be able to assess whether such countermeasures were effective in an a given IT organisation, Benestad proposes new methods to detect productivity trends in organisations of this type.
A so-called best practice among IT developers has been to distribute the functionality between “small collaborating objects”. Benestad’s analyses show that the actual effort to complete change tasks increases when the software design adheres to this principle. Another important finding is that the ability to acquire deep knowledge about the business domain and how the IT system supports the domain is essential for software developers.
The research was conducted through a systematic review of the research within the field, and statistical analyses of changes and developer effort in three large, Norwegian IT companies. The analyses were complemented by in-depth interviews with the developers in these companies.
Prior to the defence, at 10.15, Benestad presented his trial lecture Green software engineering: Substance or fad.
The adjudication committee
Professor Serge Demeyer, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Antwerp,
Professor Casper Lassenius, Software Business and Engineering Institute, Helsinki University of Technology,
Research Scientist Parastoo Mohagheghi, SINTEF ICT, Cooperative and Trusted Systems.
Chair of the disputation
Morten Dæhlen
