Abstract: Conventional wisdom suggests that better engineering tools lead to better engineered systems. Yet, despite an impressive and growing computer-supported tool landscape, engineering remains complex and hard to control. A problem we observe is that most existing tools cater to the needs of individual engineers and not the needs of collaborating engineering teams. These tools divide rather than unite because engineers only ever perceive the engineering process through the limited perspective of the (few) tools they are using – often focusing on separate kinds of artifacts, tasks, and engineering disciplines. Consequently, engineers find it hard to maintain a consistent, overall view of the engineering knowledge or propagate changes across tools and disciplines. This talk explores why it is essential for all engineering knowledge to be linked and continuously checked for correctness – with far-reaching benefits such as understanding the impact of design changes across tools.

Short Bio: Alexander Egyed is Full Professor at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Austria. He received his Doctorate degree from the University of Southern California, USA, then worked in industry for seven years before joining the University College London, UK. Dr. Egyed’s work has been published over a 200 refereed scientific books, journals, conferences, and workshops, with over 9000 citations to date. He was recognized as a Top 1% scholar in software engineering in the Communications of the ACM, Springer Scientometrics, and Microsoft Academic Search. He was also named an IBM Research Faculty Fellow in recognition to his contributions to consistency checking, received a Recognition of Service Award from the ACM, Best Paper Awards from ICSME, MODELS, ECSA, COMPSAC, ICSSP, and WICSA, and an Outstanding Achievement Award from the USC. He served on scientific panels, countless program committees, program (co-)chairs, steering committee member, and editorial board member. Dr. Alexander Egyed is a senior member of the IEEE and ACM.