2000 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2000)
Keynote Address
The Keynote Address for the
2000 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (
SAC 2000)
will be presented by
Professor Carlo Ghezzi of the
Politecnico di Milano.
Rethinking the software process
The talk will address the historical evolution of software process research,
will try to identify the current state of the art and will identify
directions for future research.
The attention to software processes dates back to the early 70's. when
software engineers realized that product quality depends on disciplined and
systematic development processes. Several approaches were proposed and
experimented, but most of the software process work remained in an informal
stage until the late 80's. From then on, research began to concentrate more
on the issue of understanding, analyzing, and formalizing software
processes. The main goal became automating software processes via
process-centered environments. The myth of process automation, however, will
be challenged in the talk. Software processes are human-centered systems,
i.e., systems were people work and cooperate in creative design tasks.
Environments supporting these processes, unlike conventional workflow
systems supporting more clerical activities, should enforce systematic
processes without overconstraining humans. The talk will discuss how the
requirements of modern human-centered systems affect the design of support
environments, and will conclude by identifying a number of open research
directions.
The Speaker
Carlo
Ghezzi
received his Dr.Eng degree in Electrical Engineering from
Politecnico di Milano, where he now holds the position of Full Professor of
Computer Science. Presently, he is also a Guest Professor at USI, the
University of Lugano, Switzerland. Prior to that, he taught at the
Universities of Padova (Italy) and North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). He
has been a visitor at UCLA and UCSB (USA), ESLAI (Argentina), the University
of Klagenfurt and the Technical University of Vienna--TUW (Austria).
His research interests are in software engineering and programming
languages. He is currently particularly interested in the theoretical,
methodological, and technological issues involved in developing network-wide
applications, with special focus on supporting geographically distributed
cooperation among people. He is a co-author of over 120 scientific papers
and 8 books. Among these, Programming Language Concepts (co-author M.
Jazayeri), J. Wiley and Sons, New York, NY, 3rd Edition, 1997; Fundamentals
of Software Engineering (co-authors M. Jazayeri and D. Mandrioli), Prentice
Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1991; and Theoretical Foundations of Computer
Science (co-author D. Mandrioli), J. Wiley and Sons, New York, NY, 1987.
He has been Program Chair or Co-Chair of several international conferences,
including the European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC-2), the IEEE
Workshop on Software Specification and Design (IWSSD-6), the Intl.
Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-14). He will be General Chair of
ICSE in the year 2000. He is a member of the editorial boards of Trends in
Software, Theory and Practice of Object Systems, Software Process
Improvement and Practice, and Annals of Software Engineering.
Carlo Ghezzi is an ACM Fellow.