Laurie Santos had much more fun with this topic, conducting behavioural economics experiments based on prospect theory with monkeys. Her aim was to see if our biases are deeply innate, or just bad habits we learn. Her conclusion was that a monkey economy is as irrational as our own. Or, as I prefer to say, that software engineers make the same mistakes as monkeys.

Laurie’s presentation at TED is far more engaging than ours, so I include it here …

Maybe this is why they call me monkey?!

For lunch Oziel and I headed to Max Burger. They have new self-service terminals for ordering, much like the self check-in terminals at the airport.

To our surprise, no one else used these terminals while we were eating our lunch – preferring the queue. But it turned out that these were even better than we expected:

• There was no queue for the terminals, while the queues for ordering with a cashier were at least six people deep.
• We could order by picture – meaning the cashier didn’t get confused with our Swedish.
• We were given many more options than we knew existed (eg. swap chips out for salad, carrots, potato gratin, etc …)
• After ordering we went to the express counter to pick up our meal and it was almost ready (fast food in Swedish is not known for being fast).

We give the Max self-service terminals the thumbs up.

Today I unpacked and the above picture is the result. It’s basically the same as my old office, except for location and outlook. Before I looked across a car park, where now I look into the library and a computer lab. Plus the new building is waterside (except in the winter, when it is ice-side).

After a rocky start my colleagues and I did end up interacting at CONES 2010 in Oslo. The proof can be found in the official photo album. I did a reasonably good job of avoiding the foreground, only being found too close to the camera once.

I am sure it is going to be a huge week in Oslo. I won’t have much time to myself. Once we arrive, I will head straight to the workshop for the Center of Nordic Excellence in Software Engineering (CONES). We will then spend the remainer of the day in seminars until we break briefly before the workshop dinner. Wednesday too will be an early start, continuing the seminars from Tuesday in the morning. After the workshop lunch, we have a research group meeting before flying back home..

With this itinerary I am unlikely to even know what happens during the first semi-final. However, my past experience of Eurovision in Sweden has been intolerable. Without the voice of Sir Terry Wogan, Eurovision becomes a serious competition, solely about the musical performances. And surely no one can take pop that seriously.

April took me to Keele University, just outside Manchester, for the Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering conference (EASE 2010). I had two papers accepted for publication at this conference. I presented one, and one of my colleagues presented the other.

The paper I presented has been important in shaping my PhD thesis. It compared the priorities placed on aspects of software product quality by employees versus subcontracted developers. This study was not originally planned, but as we had the data from the employees and all of the instruments designed for data collection, it was relatively little work and seemed like it could be interesting. The results were more interesting than we anticipated, and now my thesis is focused at examining the differences in priorities that different groups place on aspects of software product quality.

The other paper was on configuration management of requirements and related materials. This isn’t my area of research, but part of a course I took with two fellow PhD students.

Keele University is set in the English countryside. I was told, quite aptly, to imagine to imagine the set of a BBC murder mystery telemovie.

I spent half a day in Manchester before making my way to Keele.

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Oziel and I went to Mexico for Christmas with Oziel’s family. We spent the time between Christmas and new year in Chiapas, in the south of Mexico. It was completely different to the other parts of Mexico we have been, with some very stunning nature.

After a brief return to work Oziel and I headed to Australia for Hamish and Elis’ wedding. While in Australia we went to Sydney, Newcastle, the Hunter Valley and Byron Bay. On our way back to Sweden we stopped off in Japan, spending three days around Nagano, and three days in Tokyo with Laz.

My PhD is on track to finish in early 2011. I have created a webpage to keep track of the status of the thesis, and publish what is ready.

On the topic of PhD chapters, I am going to a conference in Keele (near Manchester) in a week to present what will probably be Chapter 6 in my thesis. The conference is Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE).

Oziel and I are training for a half marathon from Copenhagen to Malmö across the Öresund Bridge in June 2010.

Sometime this year we are planning to go to Rome to celebrate our birthdays (which have already passed). We are thinking to avoid the summer, which will most probably mean after the European summer.

Prior to departure I checked the weather forecast – minimums of 24 degrees each day, and maximums in the low 30s. Coming from Sweden this could only be described as hot. Upon arrival I was happy with my decision to pack light. I had a heavy jacket to get to the airport, but everything else was summer attire.

The weather during the conference met my expectations – although I was inside windowless air-conditioned rooms all day.

After the conference (Thursday-Friday), I chose to spend the weekend in Orlando before heading back to Sweden. And this is when global warming started to fail me. Saturday I went to Disney World and was quite cool (especially after Splash Mountain), and I started shopping for a jumper after nightfall (but failed to find anything I liked in a size smaller than dooner cover). However, I awoke on Sunday to head to the Kennedy Space Centre to be told by reception that the temperature was the coldest on record in 35 years. It was 10 degrees overnight with 19 as a maximum. Armed only with summer clothes I donned on two t-shirts and headed on my way … past Floridans in scarves, gloves and beanies.

The Kennedy Space Centre was amazing. If you see any job postings for positions of astronaut, please let me know.

The photos are below. I trust you can work out which are from Disney, and which are from the Space Centre.

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This conference joins two groups – people interested in the software management issues, and people interested in technical hardware issues. I fit into the former group, but in my opinion all of the keynote speakers fitted into the latter group. However, the research paper sessions were much more enjoyable.

I got some great feedback. But as it turns out this is a tangent explored as part of my PhD studies that I will not be exploring further.

I was joined by some of my friends from Blekinge Institute of Technology, who were also at the conference. This helped make for a very nice experience. Especially as one brought her family.

It was lovely to be on the Mediterranean (as you can see from the photos). But the conference and conference related activities were inconveniently placed during the beach-worthy times of day, but I suppose that is not what work paid for. But I did manage to swim before/after the conference each day.

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RefsQ would be my favourite conference to date. What makes it different is the amount of time given for discussion (much more than usual). The small environment also made it easier to get to know people.