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Keynote: Abstraction - Is it Teachable? 'The Devil is in the Detail'
Friday, 21st March - 9:00
Abstraction is a key skill for software engineers. It is essential during requirements engineering to elicit the critical aspects of the environment and required system while neglecting the unimportant. At design time, we need to articulate the software architecture and component functionalities which satisfy functional and non-functional requirements while avoiding unnecessary implementation constraints. Even at the implementation stage we use data abstraction and classes so as to generalize solutions
However, my experience is that abstraction is extremely difficult to teach and learn. How should we go about teaching this skill? Indeed, is it teachable?
This talk discusses the difficulties and challenges in learning and using abstraction. In particular, we consider whether or not the standard engineering technique of model construction and analysis can help in this venture. The importance of having associated tool support is also considered.
Brief Biographical Sketch
Professor Jeff Kramer is Head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College. His research interests include requirements engineering, software architectures and analysis techniques, particularly as applied to concurrent and distributed software. He was a principal investigator in the various research projects which led to the development of the CONIC environment for configuration programming and the Darwin architectural description language. His current research work is on behaviour analysis, the use of models in requirements elaboration and architectural approaches to self-organising software systems.
Jeff Kramer is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the IEE and Fellow of the ACM. He was program co-chair of the 21st ICSE in Los Angeles in 1999, Chair of the Steering Committee for ICSE from 2000 to 2002, and associate editor and member of the editorial board of TOSEM from 1995 to 2001. He is co-author of a recent book on Concurrency, co-author of a previous book on Distributed Systems and Computer Networks, and the author of over 150 journal and conference publications.