Future trends in software engineering

About a year after the panel convened at ASWEC 2008, my words on future trends in software engineering are still pertinent to ongoing work I am undertaking in software engineering and service-oriented architecture.

Model-driven architecture (MDA)

• not old-style computer-aided software engineering (CASE), i.e. discredited round-trip engineering
• capture different levels of abstraction; elaborating lower-levels, constrained by higher-levels

Software factories

• component-based libraries and frameworks
• meta-object facility (MOF) for store and registry of component meta-data
• dependency-injection, eg. Spring factory
• mocks objects to complement, not replace, unit and integration testing using fixtures
  

Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

• continuing growth and refinement of ontology-based software engineering
• return to not-quite components, i.e. facade for service interfaces that are explicit
• growth of resource description framework (RDF), web ontology language (OWL) - semantic-description languages and extensions (hard problem!)
• realisation that C++, Java, C#, perl, python, yacc/bison (of course) incorporate support for domain-specific languages (DSLs) by extension, genericity and composition
• convergence of object-oriented analysis and design with design and enterprise patterns
• combine patterns and domain ontology to give DSL independent of technology and platforms - "form follows function"

Non-trivial systems

• software and systems engineering merge into concrete discipline
• integration architecture, distributed and real-time computing are increasingly seen as facets of same problem
• enterprise security, single sign on, unified data views, portals - service and system mashups at user and data levels
• two-level development: 1) service and business levels based on business/logical processes and composite services; 2) implementations that conform to service and interface contracts can be in any technology, i.e. custom software, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) or free and open source software (FOSS)
• well-defined registry interface - "think global over enterprise, act local" every system and application adheres to enterprise guidelines
  
• configurable and adaptable - constrained flexibility due to absolute need to confidently test known configurations

Cross discipline

• computer science and software engineering, psychology, management
• unified analysis, richer toolkit of analytics and heuristics
• mature processes, peer review and accreditation