Research & Publications

SDG

   

Other guiding documents in my research are Xʷkʷənəŋistəl, the university indigenous plan, and Aspiration 2030, the university research plan.

Publications

• DBLP
• ORCiD
• Semantic Scholar
• Google Scholar
• ArXiv
• Slideshare
• SEI Digital Library
• SpeakerDeck

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Software Requirements and Analysis

My background is requirements analysis and modeling, and this continues to be a passion of mine. All the funky stuff we can do with programming languages, testing, design, etc. is irrelevant if we are building the wrong thing. This is particularly true in the large language model era; requirements become the prompts we use for these models to build our systems (maybe…!).

Broadening Data and Computing Sciences

My group conducts work in trans-disciplinary settings, often harder to publish but more rewarding. We have looked at data processing in remote sensing, buidling analysis pipelines, and expanding the scope of computing to a more inclusive definition.

Technical Debt and Software Documentation

Technical debt is a short-term software design choice that incurs long-term costs if not dealt with. We look at technical debt in requirements, in architecture, and for emerging machine learning systems. A recent theme is the nature of technical debt in scientific (research) software.

Qualitative Research and Peer Review

We are conducting studies into how qualitative research is emerging as a key research strategy for software engineering, which is, after all, highly subjective and contextual. A similar project looks at how we know what we know in software engineering, specifically for reviewing papers.

Bayesian Statistics

We are examining ways to improve the state of the art of software research statistical approaches, particularly by eliminating null hypothesis testing. Bayesian statistics works intuitively with the highly contextual nature of software projects, which tend to vary in size, domain, criticality, and numerous other places.

Theses

• N. A. Ernst, “Software Evolution: A Requirements Engineering Approach”. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2011. (224 pages)
• N. A. Ernst, “Towards Cognitive Support in Knowledge Engineering: An Adoption-Centred Customization Framework for Visual Interfaces”, M.Sc. thesis, University of Victoria, 2004. (95 pages)

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