Business And Leadership, Ireland's Business News Service

The fourth IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) International Conference on Global Software Engineering (IGSCE) will be held at the University of Limerick, the headquarters of Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, which will be playing host to the globally recognised event. Industry experts and leading researchers from all over the globe are expected to attend the conference, which runs from 13 until 16 July.

The globalisation of software development is pervasive in today's IT and software industry. The diversity of culture and communication and the dispersion over time and space require novel techniques, tools, and practices from many disciplines to overcome numerous difficulties and to take advantage of rare opportunities such environments entail. Such is the focus of the 2009 ICGSE, which will draw on how industry has coped with difficulties within global software engineering, as well as investigating how to cope with agile software development while working in global environment.

Delivering a keynote address at the conference will be Chief Architect for the IBM Software Group in Ireland, Mike Roche, who will discuss the role of social software and advanced collaboration systems in global software developing, drawing on the experiences of IBM and its business and research partners. Addressing the challenge to increase the productivity of GSD without significantly impacting on price will be Michael Heiss, Vice-President for Knowledge, Innovation and Technology at the globally operating Siemens IT Solutions and Services.

Also participating in the ICGSE will be Dr H Dieter Rombach, Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. Dr Rombach will focus on the growing fashion of outsourcing or off-shoring software development, while motivating the need for using multiple criteria to make intelligent choices regarding remote development site decisions.

The event, which was previously held in Brazil, Germany and India, will be chaired by Dr Ita Richardson, Research Area Leader within Lero.

“Lero is thrilled to be hosting this most prestigious international conference for the software engineering community. The ICGSE creates an invaluable platform from which industry experts and leading researchers can share their knowledge with colleagues and offer a global perspective on the current challenges facing our industry”, said Dr Richardson.

For further information on the ICGSE and the speakers or to register for the conference, visit www.lero.ie/icgse2009.