Down to the Open University Milton Keynes campus this week to show my face for real rather than virtually. I’d chosen this week as it coincided with a seminar by Dr Tom Arbuckle entitled “Let’s rethink the measurement of software evolution – and do some case studies”.

This revolved around a way of measuring the information content in software using a proxy for Kolmogorov complexity. If that leaves you going “eh?” that’s fine. I’ll stop there and continue about the day generally… …Which was tiring but stimulating and encouraging. Since the seminar overlapped with things I’d studied for my earlier Masters it was reassuring to be able to understand the talk and recognise the significance. It really helped having read the underlying paper beforehand at my own pace in what was a shocking example of preparedness.

The questions that were raised by the assorted Drs and Profs were also the questions I’d thought about and noted in my journal but hadn’t the confidence to speak up with. Hopefully that confidence in my own understanding is something that will grow.

A quick one-on-one chat afterwards was also helpful sparking no-end of thoughts, but as my supervisor (Dr. Michel Wermelinger) pointed out, filtering OUT ideas is part of the PhD process. Also had a good supervision meeting with Michel afterwards and explained how I thought my original research proposal was a dead-end. “Do network metrics predict software quality?” seems to be active and largely answered with “yes, with caveats”, so I’ll branch off into some more ideas around measuring software complexity. In the same vein as the seminar it has been useful to ask a question and find others have asked it too - it makes me feel as if I am asking good, meaningful questions. So more reading, more concept maps, more writing and drawing connections. The next target is a list of potential topics to brainstorm before Christmas.