Modern software-based systems operate under rapidly changing conditions and face ever-increasing uncertainty. In response, systems are increasingly adaptive and reliant on artificial-intelligence methods. In addition to the ubiquity of software with respect to users and application areas (e.g., transportation, smart grids, medicine, etc.), these high-impact software systems necessarily draw from many disciplines for foundational principles, domain expertise, and workflows. Recent progress with lowering the barrier to entry for coding has led to a broader community of developers, who are not necessarily software engineers. As such, the field of software engineering needs to adapt accordingly and offer new methods to systematically develop high-quality software systems by a broad range of experts and non-experts. This paper looks at these new challenges and proposes to address them through the lens of Abstraction. Abstraction is already used across many disciplines involved in software development – from the time-honored classical deductive reasoning and formal modeling to the inductive reasoning employed by modern data science. The software engineering of the future requires Abstraction Engineering – a systematic approach to abstraction across the inductive and deductive spaces.

We invite you to join the discussion on building a new discipline of abstraction engineering: with new silo-breaking research questions and research directions to explore!

Read the paper here.