Today's dominant ideas about software engineering date back to the 1970s and 1980s. Although some of the key motivations and principles of software engineering continue to hold in the current milieu, not all of them hold today and almost none of them hold quite like they did originally. The reason is that the intervening decades since the origins of software engineering have seen substantial, fundamental changes in the nature of software systems. Where early software systems were logically centralized, many of today's software systems are logically decentralized: they involve interactions among autonomous business entities. Researchers in service-oriented systems,virtual organizations, and sociotechnical systems are all essentially addressing the challenges posed by such systems.

Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering represents an update of the key software engineering principles keeping in mind today's applications. At its heart is the notion of interaction protocols specified in terms of social commitments. This talk presents the principle tenets of IOSE framed in the context of broader software engineering principles.

Amit Chopra is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Trento. He previously obtained a PhD in Computer Science from NC State University.