Some Future Software Engineering Opportunities and Challenges

This paper provides an update and extension of a 2006 paper, "Some Future Trends and Implications for Systems and Software Engineering Processes," Systems Engineering, Spring 2006. Some of its challenges and opportunities are similar, such as the need to simultaneously achieve high levels of both agility and assurance. Others have emerged as increasingly important, such as the challenges of dealing with ultralarge volumes of data, with multicore chips, and with software as a service. The paper is organized around eight relatively surprise-free trends and two "wild cards" whose trends and implications are harder to foresee. The eight surprise-free trends are: 1. Increasing emphasis on rapid development and adaptability 2. Increasing software criticality and need for assurance 3. Increased complexity, global systems of systems, and need for scalability and interoperability 4. Increased needs to accommodate COTS, software services, and legacy systems 5. Increasingly large volumes of data and ways to learn from them 6. Increased emphasis on users and end value 7. Computational plenty and multicore chips 8. Increasing integration of software and systems engineering The two wild-card trends are: Increasing software autonomy and Combinations of biology and computing