Jorge Aranda Garcia

Ph.D. Student
Software Engineering group
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Supervisor: Steve Easterbrook

Mailing address:
10 King's College Road,
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G4,
Canada.

Office:
Bahen Centre, Room 3270
E-mail: jaranda (AT) cs.toronto.edu
You can also find me at my blog, Catenary, or through my Facebook profile

Research Interests

I want to understand how information (about requirements, progress, obstacles, etc.) flows in software teams ---which means to empirically study the documents, tools, social structures, and interaction dynamics that these teams use on a regular basis for these purposes. I claim that the main reason why software engineering research is tangential to the real practice of software development is that we in academia have largely taken a prescriptive approach to the field ("This shall work") without first understanding it as it truly happens in practice ("What works for you, and why?"). I want to help fix that.

Selected Publications (click here for the full list)

J. Aranda, S. M. Easterbrook, and G. Wilson (2007) Requirements in the wild: How small companies do it. To appear in the Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'07), Delhi, India, October 2007. Most Innovative Paper of RE'07 Award.
J. Aranda and S. M. Easterbrook (2005) Anchoring and Adjustment in Software Estimation. European Software Engineering Conference / ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE'05), Lisbon, Portugal, Sept 5-9, 2005.

Teaching and TA'ing

I will not be TA'ing during the Summer, as I'll be away from campus! I've been a TA in about 12 occasions, for 9 different courses. Also, during the Winter 2007 term I lectured the course ECE450 - Software Engineering II.

Other Interests

I'm very much into board games, and I'm running out of room to store my collection. If you're also a fellow board game geek, you can find my boardgaming profile and ratings at this place.
I'm still juggling (sort of, I haven't been able to handle more than three balls at a time), and jogging (planning to run a half marathon in September-October!).
Val and I share our apartment with a deadbeat slacker named Mushi the cat. He barfs hairballs and scratches the furniture, but he's got so much moxie we simply can't kick him out.
I was very involved in two theatre groups in Leon, Mexico, as an actor, translator, and assistant director. It's been six years since I stood on stage. Val and I are setting up a Spanish-language community theatre group in Toronto. Please contact me if you'd like to join!

I last remembered to update this website on May 2, 2008.