English version
In the context of an international Chaire Francqui 2024-2025, the Faculty of Computer Science (UNamur) has the honor to receive Professor Arie Van Deursen (TU Delft, Netherlands ) from the 24th to the 27st of March, for a series of lectures on the theme of: “ Explainable Software Engineering ”.
The inaugural lecture, entitled “Explainable Software Engineering in the Public Sector”, will be held on the 25th of March 2025, at 6pm at PA02 (Sentier Thomas, 5000 – Namur).
French version
As part of an international Francqui Chair 2024-2025, the Faculty of Computer Science (UNamur) will have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Arie Van Deursen (TU Delft, Netherlands) from March 24 to 27, 2025, for a series of lessons on the theme: "Explainable Software Engineering".
The inaugural lesson, entitled "Explainable Software Engineering in the Public Sector", will be held on Tuesday March 25, 2025 at 6:00 pm at PA02 (Sentier Thomas, 5000 - Namur).
Explainable Software Engineering in the Public Sector
The field of software engineering seeks to devise theories, methods, tools, and techniques that support the development, operation, and evolution of the digital infrastructure modern society relies on. While the software engineering capabilities have advanced substantially over the past decades, it remains challenging to deliver high quality systems in a timely and cost-effective manner. Government system in particular have a weak reputation in this respect.
To better understand why, we analyze 125 complex software projects in the public sector in The Netherlands. The projects are described in public reports published by the Advisory Council on IT Assessments (AcICT), which advises the Dutch parliament and cabinet on riks and chances of success in complex Information Technology (IT) projects. The projects span a time period of 10 years, represent a total budget of over 14 billion Euros, and cover such areas as tax collection, social security, pensions, health, traffic control, defense, or water management.
We study these reports through the lens of "explainability", focusing on supporting decision making. Furthermore, we reflect on current advances in software engineering, including modern software testing and large language models, in addressing current software engineering challenges.
Program
- INAUGURAL LECTURE: Explainable Software Engineering in the Public Sector - Tuesday 25/03 - 18:00-19:00 - PA02
- SESSION 1: Architectural decision making in software engineering - Monday 24/03 - 10:30-12:30 - I33
- SESSION 2 : Tests as executable explanations - Tuesday 25/03 - 14:00-16:00 - I33
- SESSION 3: Technical debt, test smells, legacy systems - Wednesday 26/03 - 14:00-16:00 - I33
- SESSION 4: Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering - Thursday 27/03 - 10:30-12:30 - I33
About the speaker
Arie van Deursen is a professor at Delft University of Technology, where he leads the Software Engineering Research Group. His research interests include software testing, language models for code, trustworthy artificial intelligence, and human aspects of software engineering. He presently serves as chair of the Steering Commmittee of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).
He is a member of the Dutch Advisory Council on IT Assessments (AcICT), as well as a member of the Advisory Board of ING Bank The Netherlands. In 2023, he was elected fellow of the Netherlands Academy of Engineering (NAE).