About

Bio

TL;DR

I’m an Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury in the Computer Science and Software Engineering department (Aotearoa New Zealand). I’m also a member and Industry Liaison officer for Software Innovation NZ, a network of academics in computer science and software engineering.

Long version

I graduated with a Master Degree in Computer Science at the University of Namur (Belgium) in 2005. I spent a couple of years in the industry as a software developer, working for a Big 5 consulting company. I then worked as a teaching assistant, doing my PhD studies part-time and graduated in 2015. I spent three years as a post-doctoral researcher and assistant lecturer at the University of Namur working on an interdisciplinary project that lead to the WebDeb platform, an education tool for public debates and argumentation. I finally moved to the University of Canterbury in October 2017. I serve as regular reviewer in international journals (e.g., Journal of Systems and Software, Computers in Industry, Empirical Software Engineering) and international workshops and conferences (e.g., ECSA, ICSA, XP, ICSME).

Research

I’m mostly active in agile software development, and DevOps practices. My current projects include approaches to support requirements engineering with artificial intelligence (e.g., generate models, extract structured information, automated quality assessment). I’m also looking into enhancing the teaching and learning of software engineering through evidence-based teaching.

My prior work focused on model-driven software engineering and model transformations, where I developed a method and tool to trace requirements back into software architecture models. I developed a (now deprecated) tool in the Eclipse EMF ecosystem.

Industry

I’m the chair of the my department’s Outreach and Marketing Committee, as well as the industry liaison person for Software Innovation NZ, so I’m in regular contact with many industries, both Christchurch-based and New Zealand-wide. Additionally, I used to be the final year projects coordinator at the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering.