Yesterday , Today and Tomorrow An Industry Perspective

SEMAT Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow provides an historical overview of where SEMAT started, achievements of the past, today's priorities and plans for the future. The paper is aimed primarily at readers from Industry. The focus is on explaining how SEMAT achievements can help the software industry today and in the future. SEMAT in the Beginning In 2009 Ivar Jacobson, Bertrand Meyer and Richard Soley started a new initiative called SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory) with the aim of re-founding software engineering as a rigorous discipline. SEMAT started with a Call for Action in September 2009 [1]. The Call for Action pinpointed the paramount concerns and issues that challenge the field of software engineering including:  Abundance of methods that are hard to compare  Dearth of experimental evaluation and validation  Gap between academic research and industry practice. The Call for Action then proposed to re-found software engineering based on a solid theory, proven principles, and best practices that:  Include a kernel of widely-agreed elements, extensible for specific uses.  Address both technology and people issues.  Are supported by industry, academia, researchers and users.  Support extension in the face of changing requirements and technology. 2 The SEMAT initiative was very soon supported by thousands of individuals around the world, a dozen well-known companies such as IBM, Ericsson, ABB, and about equally many academic institutions such as Florida Atlantic University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Peking University. SEMAT thus established a need to restart on a solid basis, taking advantage of all that has been learned in software engineering theory and practice over the past decades. In January 2010 a solution was envisioned in a Vision Statement [2]. The Vision Statement proposed a more precise framework than the Call for Action, similar to a “requirement statement” and “roadmap” for furthering the quest to re-found software engineering. It laid out the vision, scope, goals, principles and milestones for the first year. The vision included creation of a kernel to allow for description of current and future practices and methods in the context of a common platform that enables practice and method comparison, evaluation, composition, simulation, usage, measurement, teaching and research. The scope of the kernel included essential kernel elements and the kernel language. The kernel would provide a platform for definition of practices and definition of methods as compositions of practices. In January 2011 the work on the kernel was moved to the OMG according to their regular process for adoption of a standard. This ensured the openness and fairness of the selection process so that results could benefit the entire software engineering community. In June 2011 the RFP was issued [3]. The next section provides a brief historical overview and what was planned to be done.