Who Am I? -- Waqar Ahmad

I am PhD Software Engineering student at Institute for Software Research in School of Computer Science, CMU. I hold bachelor and masters degrees in software engineering related disciplines and have considerable software development experience in information technology industry.

My motivation to take Innovation Policy and Processes course comes from its relevance to some aspects of software engineering discipline. Increasingly complex software systems are being built to solve increasingly complex social and business problems.  Software engineers are faced with various tradeoffs throughout software development life cycle. For instance, a software system may be designed using one of many possible design alternatives; which design is better than others in a particular context requires identification of design alternatives and carefully choosing the one most appropriate in a given context. Similarly, tradeoffs are required to be made during software system implementation and testing. Since Innovation Policy and Processes course deals with the concepts of defining alternatives and choosing ones that are most appropriate while giving due consideration to tradeoffs, I find it quite relevant to possible research areas I am going to pursue during my PhD. Moreover, I see another parallel in Innovation Policy and Software Engineering in the sense that both deal with finding best possible solutions for society, and it has become increasingly important to study vertical disciplines to find solutions of problems in one’s own area of interest.

I believe that Innovation Policy and Processes course will provide me insights into finding solutions to similar problems in software engineering.