面向Agent的软件工程:现状与挑战

面向Agent软件工程是近年来软件工程领域出现的一个重要的前沿研究方向,它试图将Agent理论和技术与软件工程的思想、原理和原则相结合,从而为基于Agent系统的开发提供工程化手段．近年来,随着Internet上的web应用以及软件开发社会化的发展,面向Agent软件工程受到了学术界和工业界的高度关注和重视,研究活跃,发展迅速．从应用需求和技术发展两个方面阐述了面向Agent软件工程的产生和发展背景;从技术、管理和工具3个视点综述了现阶段面向Agent软件工程的研究内容;分析了面向Agent软件工程的研究现状;最后讨论了它存在的问题和面临的挑战以指导进一步研究．     

Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments, A Brief History and Future Challenges

Software engineering environments have a history of about two decades. Early environments provided support for small fragments of the software process (usually focusing on programming-in-the small). Then there was a trend towards support for more complete software processes (from early phases like requirements analysis and design down to testing and configuration management). Ten years ago the notion of process-centered software engineering environments initiated a new field in software engineering: software process research. The key idea is to use a model of a software process as input parameter for a software engineering environment. The environment is supposed to behave in accordance to the process model. Some aspects of this vision became true, others turned out to be of little practicability. In this article, we discuss the history of software engineering environments with a particular focus on process-centered software engineering environments (PCSEEs). We discuss the notion of distributed software processes (as one of the most substantial current trends in software process research) and we motivate the notion of a software process middleware which serves as basis of real-world software processes spread over various sites. In addition, we discuss some other trends in the software process research arena.     

Challenges and Research Directions in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

Agent-based computing is a promising approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, despite the great deal of research in the area, a number of challenges still need to be faced (i) to make agent-based computing a widely accepted paradigm in software engineering practice, and (ii) to turn agent-oriented software abstractions into practical tools for facing the complexity of modern application areas. In this paper, after a short introduction to the key concepts of agent-based computing (as they pertain to software engineering), we characterise the emerging key issues in multiagent systems (MASs) engineering. In particular, we show that such issues can be analysed in terms of three different scales of observation, i.e., in analogy with the scales of observation of physical phenomena, in terms of micro, macro, and meso scales. Based on this characterisation, we discuss, for each scale of observation, what are the peculiar engineering issues arising, the key research challenges to be solved, and the most promising research directions to be explored in the future.     

Secure Software Engineering: Learning from the Past to Address Future Challenges

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a taxonomy of secure software systems engineering (SSE) by surveying and organizing relevant SSE research and presents current trends in SSE, on-going challenges, and models for reasoning about threats and vulnerabilities. Several challenging questions related to risk assessment/mitigation (e.g., “what is the likelihood of attack”) as well as practical questions (e.g., “where do vulnerabilities originate” and “how can vulnerabilities be prevented”) are addressed.     

Experimental Software Engineering: A New Conference

An interesting issue facing software engineering relates to the evidence for adopting new techniques, tools, languages methodologies, and so on. We shouldn't always reject new models based on pure argument and logic, but ideally, we should subject such developments to some form of validation. The software engineering community has addressed this issue in part by the establishment of specialist conferences. Two of these are merging, and the Technical Council on Software Engineering thought you would like to know why.     

Development of Software Engineering: A Research Perspective

In the past 40 years, software engineering has emerged as an important sub-field of computer science and has made significant contribution to the software industry. Now it is gradually becoming a new independent discipline. This paper presents a survey of software engineering development from a research perspective. Firstly, the history of software engineering is reviewed with focus on the driving forces of software technology, the software engineering framework and the milestones of software engineering development. Secondly, after reviewing the past academic efforts, the current research activities are surveyed and new challenges brought by Internet are analyzed. Software engineering researches and activities in China are also reviewed. The work in Peking University is described as a representative.     

Managing Software Engineering Projects: A Social Analysis

Managing software engineering projects requires an ability to comprehend and balance the technological, economic, and social bases through which large software systems are developed. It requires people who can formulate strategies for developing systems in the presence of ill-defined requirements, new computing technologies, and recurring dilemmas with existing computing arrangements. This necessarily assumes skill in acquiring adequate computing resources, controlling projects, coordinating development schedules, and employing and directing competent staff. It also requires people who can organize the process for developing and evolving software products with locally available resources. Managing software engineering projects is as much a job of social interaction as it is one of technical direction. This paper examines the social arrangements that a software manager must deal with in developing and using new computing systems, evaluating the appropriateness of software engineering tools or techniques, directing the evolution of a system through its life cycle, organizing and staffing software engineering projects, and assessing the distributed costs and benefits of local software engineering practices. Ths purpose is to underscore the role of social analysis of software engineering practices as a cornerstone in understanding what it takes to productively manage software projects.     

The Software Engineering Shortage: A Third Choice

As interest in the concepts and methods of software engineering increases, many companies, particularly in aerospace, find it difficult to acquire software developers with the desired skills. The option of full-time, company-based training is discussed with suggestions for implementation. Lessons learned from the actual implementation of such a program are discussed along with possible directions for future evolution.     

Large Language Models in Software Engineering Education: A Preliminary Study on Software Requirements Engineering Courses

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has made knowledge acquisition and content creation increasingly easier and cheaper,which in turn redefines learning and urges transformation in software engineering education.To do so,there is a need to understand the impact of LLMs on software engineering education.In this paper,we conducted a preliminary case study on three software requirements engineering classes where students are allowed to use LLMs to assist in their projects.Based on the students’ experience,performance,and feedback from a survey conducted at the end of the courses,we characterized the challenges and benefits of applying LLMs in software engineering education.This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on the integration of LLMs in education,emphasizing both their prominent potential and the need for balanced,mindful usage.     

软件工程方法的新进展:面向Agent的软件工程

面向Agent的软件工程方法是软件工程领域的一种新方法，与现有的开发方法相比，Agent具有较强能力对复杂软件系统中的活动实体进行高层抽象。分析了面向Agent软件工程方法对复杂软件系统建模的成功之处，并又对面向Agent的高层建模方法和基于面向对象方法的面向Agent的设计方法作了一些研究。     

软件工程研究生工程化教育模式探讨(英文)

This paper introduces the pattern of software engineering postgraduate education in School of Software Engineering of South China University of Technology(SSE_SCUT).SSE_SCUT aims to foster the software talented with capability of achieving large scale or complex systems.In its education pattern,emphasizes engineering practices are emphasized.And this education notion is implemented in the postgraduate curriculum.     

Debugging Concurrent Software: Advances and Challenges

Concurrency debugging is an extremely important yet challenging problem that has been hampering developer productivity and software reliability in the multicore era. We have worked on this problem in the past eight years and have developed several effective methods and automated tools for helping developers debugging shared memory concurrent programs. This article discusses challenges in concurrency debugging and summarizes our research contributions in four important directions: concurrency bug reproduction, detection, understanding, and fixing. It also discusses other recent advances in tackling these challenges.     

Toward Open-World Software: Issue and Challenges

Traditional software development is based on the closed-world assumption that the boundary between system and environment is known and unchanging. However, this assumption no longer works within today's unpredictable open-world settings, especially in ubiquitous and pervasive computing settings, which demand techniques that let software react to changes by self-organizing its structure and self-adapting its behavior. The more we move toward dynamic and heterogeneous systems, and the more we stress their self-healing and self-adapting capabilities, the more we need new approaches to develop these applications and new ways to structure and program them. Programming open systems requires new programming language features. Two features that bear investigation are introspection mechanisms to get runtime information about newly encountered services and reflective mechanisms to adapt client applications dynamically. Some existing standards, industrial products, and research prototypes that support, to a certain extent, the open-world assumptions are service-oriented technologies, publish/subscribe middleware systems, grid infrastructures, autonomic frameworks     

ASSL: A Software Engineering Approach to Autonomic Computing

ASSL provides a framework for formal specification, validation, and code generation of autonomic systems.     

Internet Software Engineering: A Different Class of Processes

This paper describes empirical research into Internet software development practices. The focus of our study is to develop an understanding of the features that characterize Internet software development. Based on a Grounded Theory analysis of data collected in nine US software development organizations, we identify three factors that influence Internet software development processes: demand for rush to market, operating in a different kind of market environment and the lack of experience developing such products. Though many of the characteristics of the development processes identified in our study may be observed in traditional software development, the intensity with which they apply and together distinguish Internet software development. The differences include a distinct collection of methods, tools, and management techniques for software engineering, and embody a unique development culture and negotiable software quality.