Shaoying Liu is a Professor of Software Engineering at Hiroshima University, Japan, IEEE Fellow, BCS Fellow, and AAIA Fellow. He received the Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, U.K in 1992. His research interests include Formal Engineering Methods, Specification Verification and Validation, Specification-based Program Inspection, Automatic Specification-based Testing, Testing-Based Formal Verification, and Intelligent Software Engineering Environments. He has published a book entitled "Formal Engineering for Industrial Software Development" with Springer-Verlag, more than 13 edited books, and over 250 academic papers in refereed journals and international conferences. He proposed to use the terminology of "Formal Engineering Methods" in 1997 and has established Formal Engineering Methods as a research area based on his extensive research on the SOFL (Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language) method since 1989, and the development of ICFEM conference series since 1997. In recent years, he has served as the General Chair of QRS 2020 and ICECCS 2022 and PC member for numerous international conferences. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Reliability and Innovations of Systems and Software Engineering, respectively.
Speech Title: Agile Formal Engineering Method for High Productivity and Reliability
Abstract: With the rapid development and spreading applications of IoT systems and information systems, how to ensure software productivity and reliability has become a tremendous challenge to conventional software engineering. To overcome this challenge, we have developed the “Formal Engineering Methods’’ (FEM) as a research area since 1989 to study how formal methods can be effectively integrated into conventional software engineering technologies and process models so that formal techniques can be tailored, revised, or extended to fit the need for improving software productivity and reliability in practice (e.g., through the enhancement of the usability of formalism and the tool supportability of the relevant methods). As a result of our efforts, we have developed a specific FEM called Agile Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language (Agile-SOFL) that offers a Three-Step Specification Approach, Specification Animation for Validation, Incremental Specification-Based Implementation, and Specification-Based Testing techniques. In this talk, after reviewing the commonly used development methods, I will focus on the introduction of Agile-SOFL and explain how it can be used to improve software productivity and reliability. Finally, I will describe several important and new research directions and topics for future software engineering.