Beyond programming-in-the-large: The next challenges for software engineering

Abstract

As society's dependence on computing broadens, software engineering is being called upon to address new problems that raise new technical and nontechnical concerns. Aspirations and expectations for the application of computers appear to be unbounded, but present software development and support techniques will not be adequate to build computational systems that satisfy our expectations, even at very high cost. Each order-of-magnitude increase in the scale of the problems being solved leads to a new set of critical problems that require essentially new solutions. The next challenges for software engineering will deal with software as one of many elements in complex systems, which we call program-as-component, and with the role of software as an active participant in the software development process, which we call program-as-deputy.

This work was sponsored by the Department of Defense. The views and conclusions in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.