Post-agile and technical privilege: Gareth Cronin speaks at international conference

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Associate Professor Austen Rainer, the Chair of SI^NZ and General Chair of the EASE 2018 conference shares his thoughts on the conference.

On Friday 29 June, Gareth Cronin, Executive General Manager of Partner Products at Xero, and a co-founder and CTO of Ambit,  gave a thought-provoking and challenging keynote talk at the 22nd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE’18). Gareth shared his vision of a post-agile software company, his experiences of realizing that vision at Xero and Ambit, and his appreciation of the importance to a company of welcoming and promoting diversity. Gareth also challenged the conference attendees to conduct more research on the value of diversity for software engineering, and emphasised the challenges of dealing with ‘technical privilege’ in knowledge-based companies and institutions.  Gareth’s talk was complemented by another keynote talk, from Professor Claes Wohlin, who spoke about the importance and challenges of conducting evidence based software engineering. A summary of the conference programme is available at: http://ease2018.softwareinnovation.nz/programme/. This year the conference included two tracks on impact-to-industry, including papers from software practitioners.

The International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering is an internationally-leading venue for academics and practitioners to report on their research and professional experience of software engineering. The conference promotes Evidence Based Software Engineering. Over these many years in which the conference has run, it has typically been hosted in Europe, and is only the third time it has been held outside Europe.

The conference was sponsored by University of Canterbury College of Engineering, Software Innovation NZ, and the SIGNAL ICT Graduate School.

– Report by A/Prof Austen Rainer

Photo credits: @EASEConf Twitter account