Re-founding Software Engineering – SEMAT at the Age of Three (Keynote Abstract) Ivar Jacobson and Ian Spence Ivar Jacobson International Reading, United Kingdom +44 (0)1189 001 460 ivar@ivarjacobson.com, ispence@ivarjacobson.com Pontus Johnson and Mira Kajko-Mattsson KTH Royal Institute of Technology 100 44 Stockholm Sweden +4687906825, +4687904416 pontus@ics.kth.se, mekm2@kth.se ABSTRACT SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory) and its many supporters agree that software engineering is gravely hampered by immature practices. For this reason, SEMAT supports a process to re-found software engineering based on a solid theory, proven principles and best practices that includes a kernel of widely- agreed elements that is extensible for specific uses and addresses both technology and people issues. SEMAT focuses on changing the way people deal with methods and processes, which in turn, will impact our industry, education, research and developer community. In this paper we provide a snapshot of some of SEMAT’s results and report on the experiences gained both within the academia and industry. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2 [Software Engineering]: D.2.0 General. General Terms Standardization, Languages, Theory. Keywords Kernel, alpha, activity space, software engineering theory, method, practice, education, status of SEMAT. 1. INTRODUCTION SEMAT (Software Engineering Methods And Theory) was founded in September 2009 by Bertrand Meyer, Richard Soley and Ivar Jacobson who felt the time had come to fundamentally change the way people work with software development methods [1][2][3]. Together, they wrote a call for action statement, which in a few lines identified a number of critical problems, motivated why there is a need to act, and suggested what needed to be done. The call for action is shown in Figure 1. The call for action received a broad base of support, including a growing list of signatories and supporters [16]. It also provided Figure 1. The Call for Action [16] the starting point for the launch of the SEMAT work and initiated realization of the call for action in a vision statement [5]. In accordance with the vision, SEMAT then focused on two major goals (1) finding a kernel of widely-agreed elements and (2) defining a solid theoretical basis. To a large extent, these two tasks are independent of each other. Finding the kernel and its elements is a pragmatic exercise that requires people with long experience in software development and knowledge about many of the existing methods. Defining the theoretical basis is academic research that may take many years to reach a successful outcome. Today, three years after its launch, SEMAT has made good progress towards these goals; it has found the kernel; however, it is still in the process of defining the theoretical basis. Eventually both will need to be synchronized but the plan is to get there incrementally and iteratively. In this paper, we provide a snapshot of some of the SEMAT results and report on the experiences gained both within the academia and industry. The remainder of this paper is as follows. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference’10, Month 1–2, 2010, City, State, Country. Copyright 2010 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010 …$15.00. Software engineering is gravely hampered today by immature practices. Specific problems include: • The prevalence of fads more typical of fashion industry than of an engineering discipline • The lack of a sound, widely accepted theoretical basis • The huge number of methods and method variants, with differences little understood and artificially magnified • The lack of credible experimental evaluation and validation • The split between industry practice and academic research 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 • Address both technology and people issues • Are supported by industry, academia, researchers and users • Support extension in the face of changing requirements and technology Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ASE’12, September 3–7, 2012, Essen, Germany ACM 978-1-4503-1204-2/12/09 15