Fulfilling the Vision of Stefan Bengtsson - Chalmers as a World Leader
Software engineering is a mature subject to attack. More than 10 years ago almost 40 world leaders signed a call for action: “Software engineering is gravely hampered by immature practices… We support a process to refound software engineering based on a solid theory, proven principles and best practices that include a kernel of widely agreed elements, extensible for specific uses; …”.
Many companies such as Ericsson, ABB, Microsoft, IBM, … SICS, and many academic institutions such as Chalmers, KTH, Peking University, Kaist, Florida Atlantic University…supported it. The initiative was founded by professor Bertrand Meyer (Computer Science), Dr. Richard Soley (chairman OMG) and by Dr. Ivar Jacobson (Software Engineering). Dr. Jacobson has been leading the work.
The task was staggeringly large; it was even considered foolish to think it could be done.
However, now we have proven that it can be done and that both academia and industry are adopting concrete results of the work. Hundreds of experts from both worlds have worked over many years to create a kernel of software engineering.
The kernel can be described as a Common Ground for software engineering or for all methods (a popular word right now is frameworks). It has gone through a rigorous standardization process and in 2014 The Object Management Group adopted it as a standard. Since then, it has been used as a platform to describe many popular methods and practices (mini-methods), such as Scrum, User Stories, Use Cases, Kanban, Scrum at Scale, The Spotify Model, and many more.
In this talk Dr Jacobson will give a brief presentation of the history leading up to the creation of Essence. He will briefly describe Essence and its “killer” use cases, which solves problems the world has not addressed in the past.
The learning objective of this lecture is to understand the huge impact Essence has and, if widely adopted, will have on the industry and academia with focus on academia. We have over the 60 years or so not seen anything with this foundational impact. The opportunity is for instance;
- To dramatically improve education in software engineering (and in some cases general engineering as well),
- To move software development from primarily being a craft to primarily being an engineering discipline,
- To systematically make teams and organizations forever learning,
- To provide methods and practices using AI techniques to support the developers with codevelopers/copilots; not just for code related activities but for all activities applicable in software development,
- To provide ground-breaking research in a general theory in software engineering.