Keynotes

Towards AI-Driven Software Development: Challenges and Lessons from the Field

Eran Yahav, Technion

AI is changing the way we develop software. AI is becoming powerful enough to change the nature of interaction between humans and machines and not only to raise the level of abstraction. AI-driven software development is poised to transform the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). As we move towards AI-driven software development, we must revisit some fundamental assumptions and address the following challenges:

• How does the SDLC change when autonomous agents can handle some tasks? What is the role of code and version control?
• Interaction model: What is the right human-machine interaction? How do we best communicate intent to the AI? How to best consume results?
• Contextual awareness: How do we make the AI contextually aware of our development environment? Can we make the AI hyper-local and tailored to our problem and solution domains?
• Trust: How can we trust the suggested results? How can we trust results that are not provided as code?

In this talk, we will start with practical AI-assisted software development, including lessons from the field, based on our experience serving millions of users with Tabnine. We will cover different tasks in the SDLC and various techniques for addressing them in the face of the challenges above.

Eran Yahav is the CTO of Tabnine and a professor of Computer Science at the Technion, Israel. His research interests include program synthesis, machine learning for code, program analysis, and program verification. Eran loves long-distance running, and while he has not won any medals yet, he has suffered at least one heatstroke trying.

Getting outside the bug boxes

Margaret Burnett, Oregon State University

Sometimes, we humans find ourselves a bit slow to abandon the comfort of sitting "inside the box,” and this can detract from our ability to innovate. In this talk, I’ll share some outside-the-box perspectives, gleaned from decades of software engineering work, on boxes I’ve seen when thinking about bugs — from failures to faults, from finding to fixing, and from traditional to very non-traditional notions of “what counts” as a bug. I’ll consider the intellectually freeing perspectives that can come from moving outside the “mechanisms” box to policies; the enhancement to applicability from moving outside sub-sub-area boxes to the whole software lifecycle; the differences revealed when moving outside the “typical developer” box to diverse humans; and the plethora of possibilities arising from moving outside the “buggy code” box to a wide range of bug types.

Margaret Burnett’s research runs the gamut of human-centric aspects of developing software better. Together with her students and collaborators, she co-founded the area of end-user software engineering for both traditional software and for AI; brought information foraging theory to software tools that support today's developers; and debunked the belief that software is gender-neutral, inventing methods to eradicate software's gender-inclusivity "bugs". Her work has impacted commercial software used by millions of people.

Burnett is a University Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She holds 4 patents; has received 10 best paper awards/honorable mentions and 5 Long-Term Impact awards; and has received multiple mentoring, service, and research awards. She is an ACM Fellow, and was elected to ACM's CHI Academy in 2016 as one of the "principal leaders of the field" of HCI. In 2022, she received IEEE's TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering Award, for outstanding and sustained contributions to the software engineering community. .

Keynotes