Invited Speakers

Neil White, Janet Barnes - Altran, UK

How should we build that? Evolving a development environment that's suitable for constructing today's systems

We are building ever more complex systems, and demanding of them ever higher standards of reliability, functionality, and safety. The development environment for the successful project you just delivered almost certainly needs enhancing for your next project. Maybe your team needs to use new tools, new methodologies, new architectural patterns, new process, or just a new language. You can analyse past projects, and research other people's work, but how do you choose what enhancements to make? And how do you deploy new process or tooling in an industrial context where time-to-market, margin, and success are everything? This talk will look at the key drivers behind the successful adoption of any new process or tool - from a small incremental update to a major shift in development philosophy. Along the way we will look at some real-world successes, and face up to a few challenges.

About the speakers:
Neil is the Head of Capability for Altran UK. He has worked in the area of bespoke safety-critical software for over 15 years. In that time he has delivered signature projects into a variant of markets, including UK Air Traffic Control, Aerospace, Defence, and Finance. His projects have included the first deployments to new regulatory standards, and the industrial introduction of new technologies. He is currently interested in the sustainable evolution required to keep hi-tec companies at the forefront of their markets.
Janet is a Principal Software Engineer with Altran UK. In 2011 she was a recipient of the Microsoft Research Verified Software Milestone Award for her contribution to Tokeneer, a verified software experiment which demonstrates that formal methods and early lifecycle verification can be used to deliver software cost effectively to stringent security standards. Her 20 year career has been dedicated to applying formal and rigorous techniques to the development of safety- and security-critical software.

Axel van Lamsweerde - Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Engineering Multi-View Models for Model-Driven Engineering

The effectiveness of model-driven engineering relies on our ability to build high-quality models. This task is intrinsically difficult. We need to produce sufficiently complete, adequate, consistent, and well-structured models from incomplete, imprecise, and sparse material originating from multiple, often conflicting sources. The systems we need to consider generally comprises software components, devices and people.
Such models should integrate the intentional, structural, functional, and behavioral facets of the system being developed. Rigorous techniques are needed for model construction, analysis, and evolution.  Such techniques should support early and incremental reasoning about partial models for a variety of purposes, including goal satisfaction arguments; property checks; model animations; the evaluation of alternative system design options; the systematic identification and resolution of risks, threats and conflicts; and traceability management.
The tension between technical precision and practical applicability calls for a suitable mix of heuristic, deductive, and inductive forms of reasoning on a suitable mix of declarative and operational models. Formal techniques should be deployed only when and where needed, and kept hidden wherever possible.
The talk will provide a retrospective account of our research efforts and practical experience along this route, including recent progress in model engineering for safety-critical human-intensive systems.

About the speaker:
Axel van Lamsweerde is Full Professor at the Department of Computing Science of the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. His research interests are in precise techniques for requirements engineering, system modeling, high assurance systems, lightweight formal methods, process modeling and analysis, medical safety, and knowledge-based software development environments. Since 1990 he has been instrumental in the development of the KAOS goal-oriented modeling language, method, and toolset. He is author of the book "Requirements engineering: From System Goals to UML Models to Software Specifications" (Wiley). He was Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions in Software Engineering and Methodology, Program Chair of major international software engineering conferences including ESEC'91 and ICSE'94, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He is an ACM Fellow (2000), recipient of the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award (2003), and the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2008).

Marta Kwiakowska - University of Oxford, UK