Program: Sunday, Monday

Keynote: Making Systems Explainable, Oscar Nierstrasz

Abstract. What makes software systems explainable? As we develop and maintain software, we have questions to ask about the code, but piecing together the answers remains hard. The main interface the classical IDE offers is a text editor for the source code. Code, documentation, and the running system are disconnected. In this keynote presentation, we will show how software systems can be made explainable with the help of three interacting technologies: (i) live notebooks that can be used to create narratives that link documentation, source code, and running applications, (ii) example methods that not only perform tests, but produce live examples that can be used within narratives, to explain use cases, scenarios and features, and (iii) a moldable inspector that can be easily extended with live custom views to answer domain-specific questions about software systems. With the help of running examples we will show how these technologies work together to provide a radically different kind of development experience.

Bio. Oscar Nierstrasz is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Institute of Computer Science (INF) in the Faculty of Science of the University of Bern, where he founded the Software Composition Group in 1994. He retired from the University of Bern at the end of 2021, and is currently working at feenk.com. He is co-author of over 300 publications and co-author of the open-source books Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns and Pharo by Example. Prof. Nierstrasz has been passionate about object-oriented programming since the early 1980s, and has been honoured with the prestigious 2013 Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize for contributions to the field of Object-Orientation. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Object Technology, as Programme Chair of ECOOP '93, ESEC/FSE '99 and MoDELS '06, and as PC member of countless conferences. He is also known as the author of Identify the Champion, a pattern language for managing the peer review process of conferences.