Professor Bram Adams has been noted as the recipient of the MSR 2021 Foundational Contribution Award. MSR is the international conference on Mining Software Repositories which has been celebrating the achievements of the MSR community since 2017. The MSR Foundational Contribution Award “recognizes individuals, or groups of individuals, having produced fundamental contributions in the field of mining software repositories, which helped many others (not limited to the MSR community) to build on it to advance the state of the art”.
Bram’s work focuses on release engineering which is also known as the activities required to bring code changes made by individual developers into the hands of the end user. As the concept gained further momentum in 2010, Bram has always held an active role in the field. He says
“Despite the large changes in the field in 2010, and the large interest by industry, I noticed that only very few researchers took release engineering serious as a field worthy of exploration and research. Hence, I’ve spent a lot of time “evangelizing” release engineering, through the organization of workshops , presentations, a grad course. Together with my lab’s research on novel release engineering topics (we were the first to empirically analyze many release engineering issues), this has led to a growing community, to the extent that continuous delivery and other release engineering topics are now common-place in software engineering conferences.”
The MSR Conference nomination jury has recognized Bram with the following summary.
Bram Adams is a pillar of the MSR community. He is one of the early evangelists and pioneers of the field or release engineering, has co-organised the RELENG workshop for several years, and organised Dagstuhl seminars on release engineering and DevOps. He brought together industry and academia at the events he organized or co-organized, which gave opportunity to industry practitioners to collaborate with academics in addressing pressing issues in release engineering, leading to better industry practices and the advancement of the field of release engineering. This also led to the forming of a community in the field of release engineering. Through these talks, events, and service he brought awareness to the field and attracted new people to address problems in release engineering. At the same time, he organized events and courses meant to involve students in the research and to promote teaching release engineering to students, such as the first Devops Educators Workshop and a course on release engineering at Polytechnique Montreal which resulted in 14 student publications over the years. He has also mentored several students and postdocs that have since become researchers in the field of MSR. He has also contributed to the MSR community in various roles over the years, such as Steering Committee member, PC member, and PC chair.
Professor Bram Adams will officially receive his award at a virtual awards ceremony which will take place at the 18th edition of MSR in May
Congratulations Bram and keep up the wonderful work!