ISERN'04 feedback

Feedback from ISERN'04 was collected by asking all participants to write their feedback and suggestions to individual sheets on three topics:

1. Highlights or good experiences during ISERN'04
2. Areas for improvement or problems
3. Ideas and suggestions for ISERN'05

About 60 participants gave feedback, resulting in 314 individual inputs.  All of them were collected and analyzed and after merging similar entries and editing some of them for clarity, 231 unique recommendations were identified, grouped into 30 main categories. Main findings are listed below (links to more detailed data at the end of this page).

Highlights

• Membership showcase was cited most frequently as the highlight (n=16)
• Ca. 20 citings of good session coordination, good discussions, and good topics
• Most frequently cited sessions as highlights:
  • Guidelines session (n=5)
  • Data ownership session (n=3)
  • Value of empirical research session and best practices breakout group session (n=3)
• Parallel sessions and group discussions well received (n=12)
• Schedule was cited to be good (n=2), flexible (n=2) and breaks were long enough (n=3)
• Organization was good (n=4)
• Networking was valuable (n=8+)

Problems

There was a higher variance in cited problems, i.e., there are less common patterns.  Main findings:

• Some sessions run out of time or had too little time for discussions (n=8)
• Session topics and chairs should be defined earlier (n=6)
• Some sessions did not have clear goals (n=6)
• Results of previous ISERNs should be leveraged better (n=4)

Input for 2005

• Follow-up on the progress of themes addressed in previous years (n=12)
• Start preparations earlier and involve participants more (n=6)
• Continue some of the topics from this year (n=5):
  • Guidelines for empirical research
  • Empirical data ownership
• Provide support for working between the meetings (n=6)
• Several new topics proposed:
  • How to collect accurate human subject data
  • Session on empirical SE education
  • Using human subjects to record effort
  • Is software engineering improving productivity
  • What is the role of empirical SE w.r.t other communities
  • Identification of seminal work in this area
• Make material and slides better available (n=4)

The slide set that contains the detailed mindmaps on each of the topics is available for download: ISERN'04 feedback (a PDF file).  If you are using the Mind Manager software, you can also download the feedback mindmaps in "source" form: mindmaps in a WinZip file.