Current trends in software engineering

Software engineering is a young discipline, and is still developing. The directions in which software engineering is developing include:

Aspects

Aspects help software engineers deal with quality attributes by providing tools to add or remove boilerplate code from many areas in the source code. Aspects describe how all objects or functions should behave in particular circumstances. For example, aspects can add debugging, logging, or locking control into all objects of particular types. Researchers are currently working to understand how to use aspects to design general-purpose code. Related concepts include generative programming and templates.

Agile

Agile software development guides software development projects that evolve rapidly with changing expectations and competitive markets. Proponents of this method believe that heavy, document-driven processes (like TickIT, CMM and ISO 9000) are fading in importance^{[citation needed]}. Some people believe that companies and agencies export many of the jobs that can be guided by heavy-weight processes^{[citation needed]}. Related concepts include Extreme Programming and Lean software development.

Experimental

Experimental software engineering is a branch of software engineering interested in devising experiments on software, in collecting data from the experiments, and in devising laws and theories from this data. Proponents of this method advocate that the nature of software is such that we can advance the knowledge on software through experiments only^{[citation needed]}.

Model-driven

Model Driven Design develops textual and graphical models as primary design artifacts. Development tools are available that use model transformation and code generation to generate well-organized code fragments that serve as a basis for producing complete applications.

Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines is a systematic way to produce families of software systems, instead of creating a succession of completely individual products. This method emphasizes extensive, systematic, formal code reuse, to try to industrialize the software development process.

The Future of Software Engineering ^[3] conference (FOSE), held at ICSE 2000, documented the state of the art of SE in 2000 and listed many problems to be solved over the next decade. The FOSE tracks at the ICSE 2000 ^[4] and the ICSE 2007^[5] conferences also help identify the state of the art in software engineering.