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Skating to Where the Puck Is Going: Future Systems and Software Engineering Opportunities and Challenges

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Perspectives on the Future of Software Engineering

Abstract

This paper provides an update and extension of a 2005 paper on The Future of Systems and Software Engineering Processes. Some of its challenges and opportunities are similar, such as the need to simultaneously achieve high levels of both agility and assurance. Others have emerged as increasingly important, such as the opportunities and challenges of dealing with smart systems involving ultralarge volumes of data; with multicore chips; with social networking services; and with cloud computing or software as a service. The paper is organized around eight relatively surprise-free trends and two “wild cards” whose trends and implications are harder to foresee. The eight surprise-free trends are:

  1. 1.

    Increasing emphasis on rapid development and adaptability;

  2. 2.

    Increasing software criticality and need for assurance;

  3. 3.

    Increased complexity, global systems of systems, and need for scalability and interoperability;

  4. 4.

    Increased needs to accommodate COTS, software services, and legacy systems;

  5. 5.

    Smart systems with increasingly large volumes of data and ways to learn from them;

  6. 6.

    Increased emphasis on users, social networking services, web applications, and end value;

  7. 7.

    Computational plenty and multicore chips;

  8. 8.

    Increasing integration of software and systems engineering. The two wild-card trends are:

  9. 9.

    Increasing software autonomy; and

  10. 10.

    Combinations of biology and computing.

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  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-0781, USA

    Barry Boehm

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  1. , Dept. of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Gustav Hällströmin katu 2b, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Jürgen Münch

  2. Institut für Informatik, Universität Hildesheim, Samelsonplatz 1, Hildesheim, 31141, Germany

    Klaus Schmid

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Boehm, B. (2013). Skating to Where the Puck Is Going: Future Systems and Software Engineering Opportunities and Challenges. In: Münch, J., Schmid, K. (eds) Perspectives on the Future of Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37395-4_19

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