From Software Engineering Pearls to Modeling and Back Again

In his book about ‘Software Development Pearls’ Wi21, Karl Wiegers offers valuable insights into various topics, including requirements, design, project management, teamwork, quality, and process improvement in software development and management. These lessons emerged from painful experiences in software engineering practice. In this talk, we will examine a selection of ‘Software Development Pearls’, exploring their genesis and the role of modelling in this process. We will then consider which new or improved modelling techniques are needed to cultivate further ‘Software Development Pearls’ and support current trends in software development, such as the integration of AI. In particular, we will present our ongoing research into current use cases in healthcare, intelligent manufacturing, and support for large-scale experiments in particle physics. The talk will also focus on graph-based techniques, which are particularly useful for modelling complex requirements, code artefacts, system architectures, or computing states.