Centre for Software Reliability

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Dr Cristina Gacek

Current Position: Senior Lecturer in Dependability and Trustworthiness of Socio-technical Systems

Research interests: Research aim is to facilitate the design, development and evolution of dependable computer-based systems. Dr Cristina Gacek is working towards that end by means of two separate, yet related, paths, one within the core of computing science while the other is much more interdisciplinary. These include:

• software architecture theory and its role at the various stages of the software life cycle;
• and the role of psychological and social factors in a software engineering environment.

Main current topic areas include:

• description, creation, deployment, usage, evaluation, and evolution of software architectures for dependable systems
• languages, environments and processes for dependable self-adaptive systems
• psychological and sociological factors supporting successful group work in a software engineering environment

Background: Dr Cristina Gacek joined CSR as a Senior Lecturer in Dependability and Trustworthiness of Socio-technical Systems in February 2010. She previously worked as a lecturer in the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University (UK) (2002-2010), with previous academic research experience as a researcher at Newcastle University (2001-2002), as a graduate research assistant to Prof. Barry Boehm at the University of Southern California (USA; 1993-1998), and to Prof. David Musser at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA; 1992). Cristina also has research experience from industrial environments, having led the Software Architectures Group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Germany (1998-2000) and at TRW (USA; 1995). Further industrial experiences were as a software engineer at TRW (USA; 1993), IBM (Brazil; 1988-1991), and two SMEs in Brazil (1987 and 1988).

The main areas in which Cristina has carried out research so far include: software architectures; software reuse, component-based software engineering, and software product lines; open source software; software dependability; self-adaptive systems and architecting dependable systems. She has also performed interdisciplinary research on computer-based systems.

Cristina obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USA; 1998) under the supervision of Prof. Barry Boehm; with a thesis about detecting architectural mismatches during software system composition. She has an MSc degree in Software Engineering from the University of Southern California (USA; 1995) and another in Computer Science from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA; 1992). Her BSc was in Mathematics with specialization in Informatics from the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil; 1989).

Some recent publications

• Y. Brun, G. Di Marzo Serugendo, C. Gacek, H. M. Giese, H. Kienle, M. Litoiu, H. A. Müller, M. Pezzè, and M. Shaw, “Engineering Self-Adaptive Systems through Feedback Loops,” in Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems by B.H.C. Cheng, R. de Lemos, H. Giese, P. Inverardi, and J. Magee, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5525, pp. 48-70, Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-02160-2, 2009.
• C. Gacek, H. Giese, and E. Hadar, “Friends or Foes? – A Conceptual Analysis of Self-Adaptation and IT Change Management,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2008) – In Cooperation with the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), pp. 121-128, Leipzig, Germany, May 2008.
• C. Gacek and C. Gamble, “Mismatch Avoidance in Web Services Software Architectures,” Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS) Special Issue on Software Components, Architectures and Reuse, Volume 14, Issue 8, pp. 1285-1313, April 2008.
• Gacek, C. and R. de Lemos, “Architectural Description of Dependable Software Systems,” in Structure for Dependability: Computer-Based Systems from an Interdisciplinary Perspective, Springer, ISBN: 1-84628-110-5, 2006, pp. 127-142.
• C. Gacek and B. Arief, “The Many Meanings of Open Source,” IEEE Software, Volume 21, Issue 1, pp. 34-40, IEEE Computer Society, January/February 2004.