Interview: Lidia López Cuesta, Ph.D. in Software from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), is working as Assistant Researcher in the Enginyeria del Software i Sistemes d'Informatció research group (GESSI) at the UPC Departament d'Enginyeria de Serveis i Sistemes d'Informació (ESSI).
How would you present the collaborative project?
RISCOSS is going to help companies to overcome the fear of adopting Open Source Software. Knowing the possible risks and the possible solutions can help dealing with the inherent uncertainty that comes with this kind of software.
What is your role in the project?
As part of UPC partner, my contribution is more oriented to the scientific field, although I like to think that I still keep some «practical» view coming from the 8 years I worked in a small software development company.
I'm directly involved in the work package 1, dealing with strategic modeling. At this point we are defining an ontology to be used by all the partners in order to have a precise understanding about the other partners work. My expertise is related to modeling, how the information will be modeled by the RISCOSS platform in order to get the necessary information.
What key innovation do you bring or help to develop?
RISCOSS provides me the opportunity to initiate myself in the ontologies field, it was one of the aspects I didn't include in my PhD when I was digging out in how to represent knowledge. RISCOSS may provide a possible extension to the i* language and connect it to the ontology defined by the project stakeholders.
A recent anecdote related to your work on RISCOSS models and their place in your PhD defense?
I've recently received my PhD (Cum Laude) in Software from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) with a thesis titled "The Notion of Specialization in the i* Framework" (2013). RISCOSS gave me the opportunity of proving my PhD proposal, applying my modeling skills for modeling the use cases. It was really gratifying including some “real” work in my PhD defense because my proposal is highly theoretical, focused in the i* model language formalization. RISCOSS is giving me the opportunity to implement one of my “future” research lines included in my PhD dissertation. Indeed, it's sometimes difficult to achieve doing some of the future work that you planned as a PhD student and RISCOSS helped me to accomplish that.
A word on Lidia López Cuesta, Ph.D. in Software from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).
 | Current researcher at the research group of Software Engineering for Information System (GESSI) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, Lidia was, from 2007 to 2012, Assistant Teacher at the same University. Before that, she worked during 8 years in a small software development company specialized in truck routes optimization using genetic algorithms.
GESSI has around 20 members interested in different areas related from early requirements engineering and requirements patterns to testing and monitoring services, involved also in model-driven development and architectural knowledge. A new research interest is OSS, RISCOSS giving the opportunity to go deeper in this complementary field. Lidia has been involved in some National (Spanish) and International research project from 2007.
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