2019 is over (all the best!) and it’s a good excuse to report on some of my failures and successes (from an MIP to football, in no particular order):

• most influential paper (MIP) award together with Philippe Collet, Philippe Lahire, and Robert B. France, at SLE 2019 for our 2009 paper “Composing feature models”. slides and press release (in french)

• reject of my ERC starting grant (called REVARY for Resurrecting Software Variability). Brain-consuming work that forces you to go beyond the usual territory… the cut was 29% (I was ranked between 30% and 40% grrr), but really worth doing. I have now an explicit and ambitious research plan for… 2020 at least ;)

• reject of an ICSE submission: preprint is available and already working hard to address reviews. Very frustrating since we worked hard, including in the middle of summer time… and the subject is exciting/challenging (can we learn the enormous configuration space of the Linux kernel with 15,000+ options?)

• accept of an ICSE submission about model/code co-evolution: kudos to Djamel Khelladi who has lead end-to-end the success

• accept at Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) journal for Empirical Assessment of Multimorphic Testing The idea of Multimorphic testing is to assess the effectiveness of a test suite for revealing performance variations of a system (something surprinsingly not so common in the scientific literature).

• reject of ICSE SEIP submission: preprint is available… again on Linux and its configuration space. I strongly believe we need a “smart” continuous integration system capable of tracking/dealing with configuration failures of the Linux kernel

• talk at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019: a very nice experience (I hope to attend/talk again in such non-academic events!)

• an intense year of teaching: a kind of failure (too much!) and success (I learned a lot eg http://blog.mathieuacher.com/WikipediaMatrixChallenge/)

• a few blog posts

• many interesting works on sampling and learning configuration spaces (see also this survey)

• co-chairing of VaMoS (14th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems) with Maxime Cordy: proud to help the variability community! The conference will be in 2020, but the essential work was in 2019 (I guess!)

• only one flight (from France to Greece)

• zero official chess game: my last one was in the previous decade (very strange to explain)… I’m playing a bit more online though, above 2400 ;)

• back in the football business every friday night ;-) fully for 90 minutes (sometimes midfielder, sometimes centre-forward)