Presentation Abstract

The goal of this talk is to emphasize that a discipline of assuring the quality of electronic enterprise systems and transactions can be built on top of the very large base of technologies that have been developed for more traditional application software.

The talk suggests that internet transactions and enterprises should be treated as technologically based objects that we call processes. The talk further suggests that it is feasible and beneficial to consider such processes to be software.

Viewing these processes as software immediately suggests that such software engineering approaches as phased development, computer-based execution, and rigorous testing and analysis are all applicable, and that the vehicles we have used to increase our confidence in the quality of application software should all be applicable to increase our confidence in the quality of processes. This talk will motivate the above intuitions, and will then demonstrate how to make them tangible. We provide as a specific example the application of dataflow analysis to the verification of critical properties of auctions.

About the Author

LEON J. OSTERWEIL is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously he had been a Professor in, and Chair of, Computer Science Departments at both the University of California, Irvine, and University of Colorado, Boulder.

He was the founding Director of the Irvine Research Unit in Software (IRUS) and the Southern California SPIN. He has been Program Committee Chair of ICSE 16, TAV 2, ISPW4, and SDE2, and General Chair of FSE 6. He has also presented keynote talks at such meetings as CASE 92 in Montreal, Quality Week 96 in San Francisco, the Inaugural Symposium of JAIST (the Japan Advanced Institute for Software Technology) in Kanazawa, Japan, and ICSE 9 (the Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering) where he introduced the concept of Process Programming.

His ICSE 9 paper has been awarded a prize as the most influential paper of ICSE 9, awarded as a 10-year retrospective. He has consulted for such organizations as IBM, Bell Laboratories, SAIC, MCC, and TRW, and SEI's Process Program Advisory Board. Prof. Osterweil is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.