I like the gathering of Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) for several reasons; apart from the conference is considered a high quality one despite having a limited number of papers and delegates, my mentor in empirical research, Barbara Kitchenham, has been heavily involved in EASE’s organizating committees until quite recently. So I not only try to send my work to EASE but also like to go there as often as possible. However, it looks like that I always have inconvenient experiences while reaching to the EASE venue. My journey to Keele back in 2007 was not very easy one despite I had to just travel from Limerick to Standsted airport and then over to Keele. It happened to be a longer trip than I had expected according to information that I had gathered. Anyway, it was nothing as compared to my journey from Limerick to all the way to Bari, Italy for EASE 2008.

This trip took me almost 19 hours as I left home in Limerick around 5am and arrived in Bari around mid night; Apart from a verg long journey, I experienced Italian train ride from Rome which got so much delayed that I almost missed my flight. The only reason that I was able to catch my flight was the flight had been delayed as well – perhaps, the delays are coordinated to enable people reach their destination albeit a bit late. Then Taxi driver had no clue where I was supposed to go despite I gave him the address taken from the conference website. Eventually, some help from the people standing here and there, I arrived my hotel around mid night :-(.
However, The trip for ECSA 2010 would always be unforgetable as it took me almost four hours to get from Manchester airport to Keele University, a journey that usually takes around 1 hour. This happened despite I rented a car with a GPS system; the problem happened was a detour forced by an accident. Once I missed the turn because of the accident, I kept driving on Manchester ring road for good one and half hour :-( until I stopped a police station and asked them for help. They found me going in completely opposite direction. They entered new address in my GPS system and also gave verbal instructions, which worked well until I got to Keele village. And I got lost in Keele as well because of the road work and detours – GPS wasn’t of any use and there was no one on the streets at night to help. But I found an angle who drove his car in front me to show me how to get to Keele University, where I arrived at 23:00 instead of 19:30 as planned.
Despite all these bad experiences related to travel, I have always enjoyed going to EASE where I meet a few but very familiar and warm people and program is always interesting and very good. This year was not exception as I listen to very good talks and also presented two papers co-authors by my colleague, Jason, and PhD student, Lianping Chen; I hope the delegates would have also enjoyed my presentations :-)
Next time, I’ll try to draw a more detailed plan before leaving home….