Monthly Archives: April 2013

David Notkin on Why We Publish

Posted in Research, Teaching by

This week David Notkin (1955-2013) passed away, after a long battle against cancer. He was one of my heroes. He did great research on discovering invariants, reflexion models, software architecture, clone analysis, and more. His 1986 Gandalf paper was one of the first I studied when starting as a PhD student in 1990.

December 2011 David sent me an email in which he expressed interest to do a sabbatical in our TU Delft Software Engineering Research Group in 2013-2014. I was as proud as one can be. Unfortunately, half a year later he had to cancel his plans due to his health.

David was loved by many, as he had a genuine interest in people: developers, software users, researchers, you. And he was a great (friendly and persistent) organizer — 3 weeks ago he still answered my email on ICSE 2013 organizational matters.

In February 2013, he wrote a beautiful editorial for the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, entitled Looking Back. His opening reads: “It is bittersweet to pen my final editorial”. Then David continues to address the question why it is that we publish:

“… I’d like very much for each and every reader, contributor, reviewer, and editor to remember that the publications aren’t primarily for promotions, or for citation counts, or such.

Rather, the intent is to make the engineering of software more effective so that society can benefit even more from the amazing potential of software.

It is sometimes hard to see this on a day-to-day basis given the many external pressures that we all face. But if we never see this, what we do has little value to society. If we care about influence, as I hope we do, then adding value to society is the real measure we should pursue.

Of course, this isn’t easy to quantify (as are many important things in life, such as romance), and it’s rarely something a single individual can achieve even in a lifetime. But BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) are themselves of value, and we should never let them fade far from our minds and actions.”

Dear David, we will miss you very much.

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