The CGIE model
When writing abstracts, introductions and proposals, it is important to come across with the idea so that people easily can get it. The best approach for doing this, that I know of, is the CGI model introduced to me by Dreyer (2019) at time 25:45. The CGI model stands for Context, Gap, and Innovation.
Personally, I like to extend the model with an E for evaluation. In the end of the abstract, introduction, or proposal it is a good idea to have a sentence or two that describes how you have or plan to witness the effect of your innovation.
When starting out on a new project, the CGIE model can help de-risk the project, as it gets you to ask the important questions early in the process.
Context: Why should anybody care?
Gap: Why are the current solutions not sufficient to solve the problem?
Innovation: What have you done about it?
Evaluation: And can you prove that it helped?
Implementation
In an abstract or proposal you should spend one paragraph on the Context and the Gap, and one paragraph on the Innovation and Evaluation.
A made up example about test selection:
(Context) The regression test-suites of big software projects can contain thousands of tests. Running all of these tests can take multiple days. Selecting which tests to run is therefore crucial to maintain developer productivity. (Gap) Currently, developers will manually select which tests to run after a change. This is inefficient and error-prone.
(Innovation) In this paper, we use syntactic static analysis and information logged in an initial run of the test-suite, to predict which test might have changed. Our key insight is ... (Evaluation) In a case study, we ran our approach on Maven, which has 8323 tests. Over the last 300 commits we were able to correctly predict 98 % of the changed tests, and were able to on average save 23.2 min of test time per commit.
References
Dreyer, Derek (2019).
How to Write Papers so People Can Read Them.
link
