PCODA stands for International Workshop on Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis, and it is a very nice workshop with a rather unusual format.

Like most workshops, PCODA expects submissions of papers and has a program committee that goes over these papers and selects those to be presented at the workshop. These papers are allocated 30 minutes each and they are grouped into sessions of 2 or 3.

Unlike at most workshops, at PCODA the papers are not presented by the authors, but by the session chairs. Presentations are to last no longer than 5-10 minutes and their goal is to summarize the paper so as to serve as input for discussions. Thus, the rest of the time is dedicated to discussions in which authors are asked questions by the audience.

This year I had the privilege to chair a session comprising of two papers. It was a great experience. First, I do not get every day to present someone else’s work. Second, I do not get every day to present work that is not in my main area of expertise. Third, presenting is a great experience, no matter what the occasion.

Because the two papers tackled topics that are rather far from me, I spent quite a bit of time preparing the presentations. Still, I was nervous because I did not know if I captured the right message. In the end, I thought the presentations came out decently, but one of the authors was particularly happy with my 5 minutes presentation. He actually said that it would have been hard for him to extract and present the main content so succinctly.

This came as a surprise. Why did he feel like that? How come that even if I did not completely grasp all the details, I was still able to capture the essence?

It took me a while, but in the end I came out with an answer comprised of three simple answers.

First, it is because I did not understand all details that I had to focus on the generic message. As a matter of fact, I started the first presentation about a paper proposing the use of grammar inference techniques for dynamic analysis, by saying that I am almost an ignorant of grammar inference techniques but that I find it an exciting idea to bridge the two worlds.

Second, it is because I was distant enough that I had no preconceived ideas regarding what is important and what is not. In general, researchers know so much about their subject that they get animated only about details that are at extreme depths. That is actually a good thing. The bad thing is when the same researchers believe that the audience also knows at least as much about their subject, and hence the presentation should focus on those deep details only.

In reality, the audience is not that knowledgeable and would rather want to be informed on the subject. When I asked who in the audience knows about grammar inference, only very few raised their hands. I was an ignorant in the subject, but I was not alone. Because I was an ignorant I could just emphasize what me as a typical guy in the audience saw interesting from above the sea level. And apparently, that was a good thing.

Third, you must get it really wrong to say something really stupid in the allocated 5 minutes. And actually, even if you do say something wrong it’s just food for discussion, which should be the ultimate goal of a workshop.

I also had the chance to see the perspective of the authors, as I had to defend a couple of papers as well. It was just great to see how the presenters saw our work. One thing that we learnt was that some story parts from the papers were not that comprehensible, even if we thought they were. That was a sign that we should change it, and at the workshop I had the opportunity to change the explanations by trying a different story in the live discussions.

All in all it was a very nice experience, and I believe the format works very well for such a workshop.