Guest Lecture: Why Reinvent the Wheel? - A Lecture on Software Engineering with Reuse

Guest Speaker: Tobias Dürschmid

Time: Thursday, Feb 6, 2025. 1:15pm - 2:30pm Central.

Location: FGH 134

Abstract

In today’s fast-paced development context, successful developers reuse existing code to faster implement high-quality software. However, blindly reusing code without much consideration can have disastrous consequences, as one of the most expensive software failures in history will be demonstrated in this lecture. Based on real-world case studies, this lecture will teach you how to decide whether to reuse existing modules and how to mitigate challenges that could result from software reuse.

About Tobias Dürschmid

Tobias Dürschmid (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by David Garlan and Claire Le Goues. His passion for teaching has led him to create and instruct two brand-new software engineering courses on large-scale software design and design patterns at CMU. Furthermore, he gained other teaching experiences in courses on agile software development, formal and informal modeling of software, and software architecture. His research interests include program analysis, software architecture, robotics systems, empirical software engineering, and educational research. His long-term vision is to educate new generations of software engineers to design software systems to be robust, changeable, interoperable, reusable, and testable and to advance software engineering education towards more effective teaching methods that foster a practical engineering mindset in computer scientists.