Essence of Software Engineering

#Software #Engineering #Academia #Development #Methods

Software development is a balance of meeting deadlines, satisfying stakeholders, dealing with risk, and somewhere along the line, improving the way development teams work.  Each development practice be it waterfall, iteration, spiral, and more recently, Agile seems to have the “right way” to develop software.  Determining how to improve can be difficult as often teams are locked into development practices.  SEMAT (Software Engineering Methods and Theory) was founded in September 2009 by Ivar Jacobson, Betrand Meyer and Richard Soley.  The intent of SEMAT is to break out of development silos through the development of an agnostic kernel that can be tailored to the needs of any team using any development practices. SEMAT took all the methods to develop what they refer to as the Essence of Software Engineering Kernel. This talk introduces some of the tenets of the Essence Kernel, ho wit addresses the number of methods and variations, lack of credible experimental evaluation and validation among common methods and the split between industry practice and academic research. Besides introductory information, the presentation’s intent is to encourage discussion, especially about the gap in software engineering between academia and industry.