CSI's CONSEG 2011

The committee had Dr Anirban Basu, Chairman, CSI Bangalore Chapter as the Chairman Organizing Committee. Members of CSI Bangalore Chapter, members of academia and of IT industry helped in organizing this conference. CONSEG-2011 received excellent response from all segments of IT professionals and in the two days discussed all aspects of software engineering which impacts quality of processes and products.

Mr. Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM, inaugurated the Conference on February 18 and congratulated Computer Society of India for organizing this conference with this theme. He complimented CSI for the excellent work it is doing for the IT professionals. In his inaugural address, he discussed the changing business scenario and need for innovation to cope with the market dynamics. He discussed the global changes that are taking place, and changes happening in quality standards. He shared some trends that will have a major impact on how we do business: due to demographics, advancement of technology, and outsourcing to SMEs by large IT organizations. According to him, the advent of UID will change the IT fabric of the country.

Dr Omkar Rai, Director General of Software Technology Parks of India, who was the Guest of Honour in the Inaugural function, gave some important statistics on the employment provided by the IT Industry. The volume of IT export has grown up in the last one year and so has the number of people employed in this sector, which is now close to 2.3 million. He went on to release the Proceedings of the conference containing a compilation of papers accepted for presentation in the CONSEG 2011 and published by Tata McGraw Hill.

Mr. Hari Kumar Jha, Managing Director, KEONICS, who was the Guest of Honor gave the views of a layman and how he sees the role of IT in bringing about changes in the society.

Mr. M D Agrawal, President Elect of Computer Society of India discussed the role of CSI in spreading IT awareness in the country through the 66 chapters and few hundred student branches. He discussed the plans of CSI for doing more for all sections of society.

Due to the importance of the topic, a number of organizations joined CONSEG 2011 technical cosponsors and partners and the list includes IEEE, PMI, Bangalore SPIN, SPIN Chennai, and ISACA. In his welcome address, Dr Anirban Basu thanked the sponsors and partners for their generous support which included Microsoft, VMware, IBM, STPI-Bangalore, IT BT dept of GOK, Siemens, Tally Solutions, QAI, Robert Bosch, CDAC and Thoughtworks. PC Quest was the Media Partner.

The conference had a very interesting program with a good mix of Theory and Practice. from academia and industry. The program was designed to help software engineers in transforming theoretical concepts into robust Software Engineering practices and also to give researchers opportunity to learn about issues waiting for solutions.

A number of renowned experts came all the way to share their expertise. The list includes:

• Bill Curtis from CAST,

• Murray Cantor from IBM,

• Ram Chillarege from Chillarege Inc.,

• Alain Abran from University of Quebec,

• K S Trivedi from Duke University,

• Dan Galorath, from Galorath Consulting,

• Ramamohanarao Kotagiri, from University of Melbourne

Plenary Talks were delivered by Technical Leaders from Microsoft India Development Centre, Hyderabad and from VMware, Australia.

Leading Software Quality experts from Indian organizations like Infosys, Siemens, KPMG, Robert Bosch, Thoughtworks, etc. also addressed the conference and papers were presented by TCS, ABB, DRDL, MindTree, VMware, Geometric, Indian Statistical Institute and by other academic and IT organizations.

The conference started on February 17 with choice of 5 Pre Conference Tutorials on topics of great interest and relevance which included:

• Requirements Management by Murali Chemuturi

• Parametric Estimation, by Dan Galorath

• Quality Attributes by Alain Abran

• Software Processes by Bill Cutis

• Software Aging and Rejuvenation by Kishor Trivedi.

The Tutorials  were very well attended and provided to be a good forum for interaction.

In short all the participants enjoyed the deliberations of CONSEG 2011 and felt that the proceedings of CONSEG 2011 will help in enhancing the software engineering skills of both IT professionals and academics.