The Idiosyncratic Project Hypothesis

An anonymous author reports on a seminal work in which the existence of LORD was empirically proved by a controlled experiment.  Indeed, it is often the case that existence of certain phenomena can be proved experimentally. However,  the converse is much more difficult. It seems impossible to produce an empirical proof for the non-existence not only of the entity studied in the said experiment, but also for many other phenomena, starting at the Arthur's holy grail and ending with topics studied in software engineering.

In this talk, I will discuss a number of empirical studies carried out at the Technion, which, together accumulates strong evidence against the existence of a software engineering holy grail, namely that knowledge gained in one software project might be useful for other such projects.
These studies lead to strengthening  belief in what we call "The Idiosyncratic Project Hypothesis".  Our main tool in doing so, is applying statistical reasoning to compare the distribution of the software metrics between projects. 

Yossi Gil is Associate Professor at the faculty of computer science at the Technion. He also served for five years or so as a visiting researcher in IBM research centers, in Google, and in  the department of computer science of the University of the university of British Columbia. He hold a B.Sc. and M.Sc. titles conferred by the Hebrew university of Jerusalem (both summa cum laude).  His Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Avi Wigderson, both at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem.  His work spanned areas such as PRAM computation, lower bounds, algorithms, pattern analysis, and object oriented programming. He earned a 10 year best paper awards on  his work on design patterns (together with Eden and Yehudai) and visual modelling (with Kent). His poems granted him the "Ofer Lider" prize for literary work among scientists. Among his eclectic works is a 8086 assembly program "Terse",  a marvel 4K full screen editor and an independent solution of the quartic polynomial equation.