Are You Getting Traction? Tales from the Tech Transfer Trenches with Satish Chandra

June 25, 2015

So you have developed a new software productivity tool, published a research paper about it, and you are justifiably proud of your work. If you work for a company, your (curmudgeonly) manager now wants to see its "impact" on the business. This is the part where you have to convince someone else to use your shiny new tool in their day-to-day work, or ship it as a product. But, you soon realize that getting traction with developers or product managers is significantly harder than the research itself. Sound familiar?

In the past several years, Satish was involved in taking a variety of software productivity tools to various constituencies within a company: internal users, product teams, and service delivery teams. In this talk, he would like to share the experiences he had in interacting with these constituencies; sometimes successful experiences, but at other times not so successful ones. The TechTalk will focus broadly on tools in two areas: bug finding and test automation. Satish will make some observations on when tech transfer works and when it stumbles.

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Satish Chandra

Satish Chandra obtained a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997, and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur in 1991, both in computer science. From 1997 to 2002, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where his research focused on program analysis, domain-specific languages, and data-communication protocols. From 2002 to 2013, he was a research staff member at IBM Research, where his research focused on bug finding and verification, software synthesis, and test automation. He joined Samsung Electronics in 2013, where he leads the advanced programming tools research team. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.