Software Engineering Institute

Participants identified a need to invest in the right technical domains and to improve mechanisms for collaboration among academia, industry, and the federal space. Five major themes emerged:

1. AI is transforming the software engineering process and how we engineer software systems. The increasing symbiosis of humans and machines is transforming every phase of the software development lifecycle.
    
2. While generative AI has reached a level of sophistication that may seem to resemble human intelligence, it is considerably harder to determine the level of trust that should be placed in the outputs.
    
3. Redefining the discipline of software engineering to encompass the use of new technologies (including but not limited to generative AI) is imperative, along with rethinking the associated curricula, tools, and technologies. This effort is key to designing and building, evolving, and evaluating trustworthy software systems in a responsible, ethical way.
    
4. New technologies, including generative AI, seem to hold the promise of making almost everyone a programmer. As a result, AI literacy and the development of new skills are needed throughout the workforce.
    
5. The use of AI tools such as large language models can mask the tradeoffs being made between the functionality of software systems and their safety and security. Research is needed to identify and make explicit the key engineering tradeoffs being made during the design, development, training, testing, and authorization of systems that include AI components.

These themes align with three areas of future research—AI-augmented software development, assuring continuously evolving systems, and engineering AI-enabled software systems—recommended in the 2021 SEI report Architecting the Future of Software Engineering: A National Agenda for Software Engineering Research and Development. The workshop marked a milestone for the SEI’s National Agenda, which calls for the software engineering community to come together around rapidly changing challenges.

“Now that fast-moving AI technologies are beginning to affect all aspects of society, it is more important than ever to bring together cross sections of academia, industry, and government to inform a community strategy for building and maintaining U.S. leadership in software engineering,” said Anita Carleton, SEI Software Solutions Division director and the workshop’s co-organizer.

Download the summary of the U.S. Leadership in Software Engineering & AI Engineering: Critical Needs & Priorities Workshop from the SEI Digital Library.