PhD - Completed!

This post bookends the post that started this entire blog four and a half years ago. Today I received the result for my PhD in Software Engineering! My thesis, Derivation of a General Purpose Architecture for Automatic User Interface Generation was highly praised by the examiners:

"In summary, a very satisfying, inspiring, carefully laid out, meticulously planned and executed thesis. I unhesitatingly recommend that the candidate be admitted to the degree of PhD"

I would like to acknowledge and thank a number of people for their support, advice and encouragement.

My supervisor, John Leaney, was instrumental in opening me up to the world of academic rigour. I would like to thank him for challenging me to think about epistemologies and research methodologies, interview techniques, reflection, VVT and GQM, and a host of other disciplines. His support and enthusiasm for my work never faltered. Most of all I would like to thank him for being able to readily understand my goal, and bridge the divide between the commercial world I knew and the research community I aspired to join.

I would like to thank those people who posted forum messages, blogged, tweeted, wrote magazine articles, and published papers regarding my work. I would like to thank my interviewees and adoption study participants for their time and feedback. Given the Action Research methodology of my thesis, their observations were critical to my progress. I would like to thank Dan Haywood of the Naked Objects team, who was always friendly and supportive, and very professional considering the sometimes conflicting nature of our projects! I would also like to thank Dan Allen, for his help shepherding my research within Red Hat.

Finally I would like to thank and apologise to my family who lived with my long absences throughout – both physical absences during the weeks, and mental absences during the weekends when I couldn't drag my head out of the work.