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Last week I introduced the very first release of the OpenTrace tool at this year's WCRE conference in the lovely city of Kingston, Ontario. This 4-day event was the 19th conference on reverse engineering and hosted talks from research and industry on the state-of-the art techniques for program comprehension of software systems.

Among the diverse tool demonstrations, I showcased our paper with a live demo of the OpenTrace workbench in the context of traceability between software requirements and source code. We walked through the workbench from its quick-installation and automatic link recovery to benchmarking and visualizing traceability results. During the question and answer period of this presentation, the audience was excited to see our efforts in unifying many aspects of the traceability problem into a very configurable and open-source tool!

I was really surprised to see, at least in mild form, the reoccurring themes of "research reproducibility" and "tool availability" experienced by other presenters. To me, this strengthens the belief that publishing experiments that are packaged along with their tools, configurations and datasets is a very big step in the right direction towards seamless reproducibility.

It was truly fun to meet fellow bright engineers and a great learning experience having the privilege to share my OpenTrace work at the WCRE conference as well as my ReqWiki contributions at the collocated MUD workshop. So what's next in store for me?.. maybe submit more work to conferences like these!

~ Elian Angius

Kingston City Hall