Monday
November 27
4:00 - 4:50 PM 
Kelley 1001

 

Robin Abraham 
Ph.D. Candidate
School of EECS
Oregon State University

 

 

Software engineering for the masses

 

Programming is not easy even for trained professional programmers.
Environments like spreadsheets allow end users to develop programs. It
is not surprising that a majority of such end-user programs have
non-trivial faults. Some surveys estimate that up to 90% of commercial
spreadsheets have faults in them. Many of these faults have huge
financial impact, and quite a few of these "horror stories" have been
reported in the news media. The main cause of the high incidence of
errors in end-user spreadsheets is the lack of tool support for error
detection/prevention. Since it is not feasible to train all end users in
"good" software engineering practices, how can the benefits of software
engineering techniques be brought within the reach of end users? In this
context, the main thrust of my research has been towards exploring ways
to help end users develop safer spreadsheets. In the talk, I will
present some of the tools we have developed and results from empirical
evaluations of the tools.

 

Biography:

 

Robin Abraham is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University. He received
his BTech. (Hons.) in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of
Technology, Kharagpur, India in 1997. After working as a database
administrator and software engineer for three years, he joined Oregon
State University in 2000 and completed his masters in Computer Science
in 2003. While at the Oregon State University, he was awarded the Best
Graduate Teaching Assistant award in 2001, and the Best Graduate
Research Assistant award in 2006 by the College of Engineering. Mr Robin
Abraham and his advisor Dr Martin Erwig won the Best Paper Award at the
IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human- Centric Computing, 2004.

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