Page - 144 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

144 I. Schieferdecker 5 Outlook Software engineering has changed dramatically since 1968, when it was coined for the first time as an engineering discipline [35]. According to [25]), software engineering has been in the Structured Methods Era 1960–1980 and in the Object MethodsEra 1980–2000and is currently in the Agile Methods Era. These eras not only brought “method wars” and “zig-zag-paths” to software engineering, but also putthefocusontechnicalaspects,softwarefeaturesandmethodologicalapproaches rather than putting it on the societal impact of software. In fact, along recent digital transformation discourses, not only the central role of software became apparent to the public, but also the need to find a new framing for software engineering. This framing is coined to be “responsible software engineering” in this chapter. It is constituted by five central elements, which are sustainability by design performed by people in power, techno-social responsibility by the software communities, responsible technology development by the society, state-of-the-art softwareengineeringwithineverysoftwareprojectandtheWeizenbaumianoathfor all experts. Responsible software engineering is anticipated by several initiatives that arose from discussions around professional ethics in the software communities specif- ically as well as by addressing grand challenges in research and innovation in general. It will take time till wide-spread acceptance and deployment, but we need to take actions now and developapproachesand programswhich are taught at uni- versitiesand in industry.Alongdigital transformation,softwareand its engineering became public goods and have to be addressed and coped with appropriately. It is notanylongeranicheconcern,but it is in the interestofusall todesignanddevelop the software also on the basis of a public discourse. In this view, software quality is to be extended along societal impact, transparency, fairness and trustworthiness, which will require not only new or extended methods and tools, but also updated processesandregulations. Acknowledgments This work has been partially funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) under grant no. 16DII111 (“Deutsches Internet-Institut”, Weizenbaum-Institute for the Networked Society) as well as by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and NuclearSafetyundergrantnumber01RIO708A4(“GermanAdvisoryCouncilonGlobalChange”, WBGU). The author thanks the numerous discussions with Stefan Ullrich, Jacob Kröger, Andrea Hamm,Hans-Christian Gräfe,DianaSerbanescu, GunayKazimzadeandMartinSchüsslerall from Weizenbaum-Institute as well as with Reinhard Messerschmidt, Nora Wegener, Marcel J. Dorsch, Dirk Messner and Sabine Schlacke atWBGU. Last but not least, the author thanks the iSQI team for years of successful and pleasant cooperation tomakesoftware qualitymorepresent and tooffernumerous software quality training schemes that improve the knowledge and expertise in the field. Congrats on its 15th birthday, wishing iSQI at least another 15 successful years of extending the body of knowledge in software quality.