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Keynote Lectures

Software Engineering Challenges in Blockchain-based Decentralized Systems
Davor Svetinovic, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria, Austria

Crowdsourcing Software Development: Silver Bullet or Lead Balloon
Brian Fitzgerald, University of Limerick, Ireland, Ireland

Resilient Engineers and Sustainable Software: Levelling Up to the Challenges
Birgit Penzenstadler, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, Sweden


 

Software Engineering Challenges in Blockchain-based Decentralized Systems

Davor Svetinovic
Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
 

Brief Bio
Davor Svetinovic is a Full Professor at Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria, and the Chair of the Institute for Distributed Ledgers and Token Economy. He received his doctorate degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, in 2006. He did his post-doctoral work at TU Wien, Austria, and Lero -- the Irish Software Engineering Center, Ireland. In 2008, he joined the MIT (Visiting Professor, Research Affiliate) – Masdar Institute (Assistant/Associate Professor) Initiative as a founding faculty member and contributed to the development of the Masdar Institute and the overall advanced research ecosystem in the United Arab Emirates. Following early success, the Masdar Institute was merged with two other universities (PI and KUSTAR) to form the Khalifa University, a top-ranked research-intensive university, where Prof. Svetinovic has continued his blockchain technology research. He was also a research affiliate at the world-renowned MIT Media Lab, MIT, USA. Prof. Svetinovic has extensive experience working on complex multidisciplinary research projects. He has authored or coauthored more than 85 papers in leading journals and conferences, and he is a highly cited researcher in blockchain technology. His current research interests include blockchain technology, cryptoeconomics, trust, and software engineering. His career has furthered his interest and expertise in the development of advanced research capabilities and institutions in emerging economies. Prof. Svetinovic is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM.


Abstract
Blockchain technology has already established itself as an enabling technology for the development of a variety of new complex decentralized software systems. For example, the integration of the blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) provides a promising new research and development direction that has generated significant research funding and venture capital investments. At the same time, each of these technologies is coming forward with a new set of software engineering challenges (e.g., understanding of the requirements related to trust and ethics, software system resilience towards unpredictable social behavior, development of the “ultra-long-term” software systems, etc.) In this keynote talk, I present our recent work related to blockchain and trust from the software engineering perspective. The emphasis is put on the context created by the other software engineering community efforts in the area. Finally, I present the most important software engineering challenges in the development of these complex blockchain-AI-IoT decentralized and trust-related systems.



 

 

Crowdsourcing Software Development: Silver Bullet or Lead Balloon

Brian Fitzgerald
University of Limerick, Ireland
 

Brief Bio
Brian Fitzgerald is Director of Lero – the Irish Software Research Centre where he previously held the role of Chief Scientist. He holds an endowed professorship, the Krehbiel Chair in Innovation in Business & Technology, at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he also served as Vice President Research. He currently serves as President of the Association for Information Systems, the global body for information systems worldwide. He holds a PhD from the University of London and his research interests lie primarily in software development, encompassing open source and inner source, crowdsourcing software development, agile and lean software development, and global software development. His publications include 17 books, and almost 200 peer-reviewed articles in the leading international journals and conferences in both the Information Systems and Software Engineering fields, including MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Information Systems Research (ISR), IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) and ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology (TOSEM). Prior to taking up an academic position, he worked in the software industry for about 12 years, including positions with Citibank in Frankfurt and Brussels.


Abstract
Crowdsourcing is emerging as an alternative outsourcing strategy which is gaining increasing attention in the software engineering community. However, crowdsourcing software development involves complex tasks which differ significantly from the micro-tasks that can be found on crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk—the latter are much shorter in duration, and typically very simple and do not involve any task interdependencies. To achieve the potential benefits of crowdsourcing in the software development context, companies need to understand how this strategy works, what challenges arise, and what factors might affect crowd participation. Research to date on crowdsourcing software development has tended to focus on the ‘crowd’ or the technical platform, with little research from the perspective of the customer who is seeking to leverage the crowdsourcing development model. The findings from an in-depth case study of crowd-sourcing software development in a Fortune 500 company are augmented with an analysis of over 13,000 crowdsourcing competitions over a ten-year period on a popular crowdsourcing platform are drawn on to evaluate the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in a software development context.



 

 

Resilient Engineers and Sustainable Software: Levelling Up to the Challenges

Birgit Penzenstadler
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
 

Brief Bio
Birgit Penzenstadler is faculty at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Lappeenranta Lahti University of Technology, Finland. Her research focus is how neuroplasticity practices can support engineers and other computer workers in improving their presence, creativity, cognitive abilities, immune systems, sleep and overall resilience (for details, see www.twinkleflip.com). She has been researching the relation between sustainability and software engineering for a decade and focuses on artifact-based requirements engineering and requirements engineering for sustainability. Her expertise includes requirements elicitation, analysis, design and documentation techniques, for example sustainability goal modeling, as well as artifact models, quality modeling, tool support, and process improvement (see www.sustainabilitydesign.org and http://birgit.penzenstadler.de).


Abstract
Software engineers have a responsibility for the long-term consequences of the systems they put in place. Software systems bring many benefits and positive impacts to humankind, but also a number of inherent risks and potential negative impacts. We explore a range of such impacts across all dimensions of sustainability and how they can be discovered systematically. We show 1) how positive impacts can be supported and reinforced, and 2) how negative impacts can be anticipated and mitigated. Let’s choose the responsibility that comes with developing software systems not as a burden but as a privileged chance to shift and transform our impacts on the world. And let’s address that specifically the last two years have brought significant burden to the health of everyone and that this needs to be addressed. Therefore, the last part of this keynote expands on how neuroplasticity practices can support engineers and other computer workers in improving their presence, creativity, cognitive abilities, immune systems, sleep and overall resilience.



 



 


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