SERT – Software Engineering ReThougt

SERT - Software Engineering ReThought is a pioneering research project aiming to address the next generation of challenges for companies developing software-intensive systems and products. We as an engineering lab are paving the way to introduce 3rd generation empirical software engineering - which means close co-production of pragmatic problem solving in close collaboration with our industrial partners as we perform technical research on topics critical to technical and business success.

SERT's formulation of the 3rd generation of empirical software engineering will use related knowledge areas as catalysts to solve challenges. Value-based engineering, data-driven evidence-based engineering and human-based development will complement software engineering competences in an integrated ecosystem of competences focused on the challenges at hand.
All areas of software engineering, from inception, realization to development, are part of the research effort - reflecting that businesses need solutions that cover their entire ecosystem.

Software is at the heart of almost every product and service today. Filing taxes, banking, driving a car or even making a dentist appointment - all are powered by software. Software has created unprecedented benefits for businesses that can become more efficient and create smarter products to compete in the market. Software even makes it possible to create entirely new types of businesses, as we see almost daily. But as more companies are created and old companies essentially become software development companies, the amount of software and the number of software development organizations explodes. Software is also increasing in size, complexity and interaction between software components at an uncontrollable rate. This places new demands on how software is designed, developed and maintained - in short, software engineering. Finding a balance between creating business and customer value, as quickly and sustainably as possible, while keeping costs as low as possible to maximize market competitiveness.

The Software Engineering ReThought research profile combines an existing and solid knowledge base in empirical software engineering with multi-voice co-production to formulate a new research philosophy to start rethinking how we research to solve and then solve problems in software engineering. Multivocal means that as software engineering researchers we use knowledge and expertise from other research disciplines to address specific challenges in software engineering. In a world increasingly driven by software, the number of factors influencing software, its use and production is growing. We need multiple perspectives to create well-tailored solutions. Multi-voiced co-production is achieved by involving expertise from the fields of human-, data- and value-focused technologies as catalysts to accelerate research together with industrial partners to solve real challenges identified in industry.

The Profile team, through close collaboration with its eleven industrial partners, has identified six main challenges related to the future and critical needs of industry. To address these challenges, a total of seven sub-projects have been formulated, each with clear research questions and objectives. Each sub-project is linked to several of the identified challenges, which in turn are linked to several of our partners. These links allow us to work in close collaboration with our partners to achieve true symbiosis between the sub-projects, researchers and businesses. The profile has a strong emphasis on working with companies to solve their problems in a real environment to achieve real impact in practice(co-production).

The Software Engineering Research Lab at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH)has been instrumental in leading the evolution from "technical" software engineering in a "lab" environment to empirically grounded software engineering, as a science, with solutions tested in real industrial contexts. This started with the early work on the BESQ profile in 2002 and has continued until today through collaborations with over 30 companies. Software engineering as a field evolved towards evidence-based research, which can be seen in the fact that the main scientific venues now focus on empirical work (e.g. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) empirical track, Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) conference upgraded to grade A in CORE, Empirical Software Engineering journal has received the highest impact factor, etc.

However, over the last decade of empirical work, through close collaboration with industry, we have seen increasing evidence that this is still not enough. There is a need to rethink how we work with software engineering. We can do more, reach higher and solve bigger and more fundamental challenges - both new and old - by integrating multiple competences to create more comprehensive, useful and fit-for-purpose solutions. In particular, we have seen that empirical software engineering needs to integrate (i) more intelligent automation and data-focused approaches that leverage expertise from machine learning and AI research, (ii) value-focused, efficient and effective solutions that leverage expertise from business economics, and (iii) solutions that are human-centric and take into account the human stakeholders in software use and technology, drawing on social and behavioral sciences. So, it is not enough to have a new perspective or a new driver, but it is time to integrate multiple competences and perspectives in every improvement.

This will result in better software engineering solutions to meet the major challenges of industry. It will also result in an improved understanding of how to create more comprehensive solutions that take into account multiple aspects and areas of knowledge to achieve multi-voice co-production (see section 1.3.1 for definition).

The Software Engineering Lab at BTH will thus not only build competence in the three key areas identified above, but also build process and methodological knowledge on how to achieve multi-voice co-production of practical software engineering solutions. That is, how to use skills and knowledge from multiple scientific fields, integrating them into software engineering, to solve real industry challenges and achieve maximum impact.

Co-production with multiple voices will allow the creation of new software engineering principles and methods that take into account more aspects and thus can better adapt to real-life situations and challenges. This means both research and better solutions, but also training the next generation of software engineers - engineers with a solid foundation in software engineering, but with an ability to identify broad, real-world challenges and see it as normal to solve these challenges by leveraging areas of knowledge traditionally outside software engineering.

Multi-voice co-production for this profile project means using the empirical core of software engineering at the Software Engineering Lab at BTH, integrating knowledge and expertise from three main related areas, to start investigating solutions to the challenges identified in collaboration with our eleven industrial partners. We call this ReThinking software engineering.

Website

https://rethought.se/