Future of Software Engineering session

This paper is a travelogue of Software Process research and practice in the past 15 years. It is based on the paper written by one of the authors for the FOSE Track at ICSE 2000. Since then, the landscape of Software Process research has significantly evolved: technological breakthroughs and market disruptions have defined new and complex challenges for Software Engineering researchers and practitioners. In this paper we provide an overview of the current status of research and practice, highlight new challenges, and provide a non-exhaustive list of research issues that, in our view, need to be tackled by future research work.

At the end of the second millennium, mobility was a hot research topic. Physical mobility of devices was becoming commonplace with the availability of cheap wireless cards, the first attempts to transform phones into personal do-it-all devices were beginning to appear, and mobile ad hoc networks were attracting a huge interest from many research communities. Logical mobility of code was still going strong as a design option for distributed systems, with the Java language providing some of the ready-to-use building blocks. In 2000, when we put forth a research “roadmap” for software engineering for mobility, the challenges posed by this dynamic scenario were many. A decade and a half later, many things have changed. Mobility is no longer exotic: we juggle multiple personal devices every day while on the move, plus we grab and update applications on a whim from virtual stores. Indeed, some trends and visions we considered in our original paper materialized, while others faded, disappeared, or morphed into something else. Moreover, some players unexpected at the time (e.g., cloud computing and online social networks) appeared on the scene as game changers. In this paper we revisit critically our original vision, reflecting on the past and peering into the future of the lively and exciting research area of mobility. Further, we ask ourselves to what extent the software engineering community is still interested in taking up the challenges mobility bears.

Over the past two and a half decades software architecture has emerged as an important subfield of software engineering. During that time there has been considerable progress in developing the technological and methodological base for treating architectural design as an engineering discipline. However, much still remains to be done to achieve that. Moreover, the changing face of technology raises a number of challenges for software architecture. This travelogue recounts the history of the field, its current state of practice and research, and speculates on some of the important emerging trends, challenges, and aspirations.

Software services companies offer software development, testing and maintenance as a “service” to other organizations. As a thriv- ing industry in its own right, software services offers certain unique research problems as well as different takes on research problems typically considered in software engineering research. In this paper, we highlight some of these research problems, drawing heavily upon our involvement with IBM Global Business Services organization over the past several years. We focus on four selected topics: how to organize people and the flow of work through people, how to manage knowledge at an organizational level, how to estimate and manage risk in a services engagement, and finally, testing services. These topics by no means cover all areas pertinent to soft- ware services; rather, they reflect ones in which we have personal perspectives to offer. We also share our experience in deployment of research innovations in a large service delivery organization.