On Generative Requirements Engineering and Design

Software development projects often fail not due to technical issues, but rather because of misunderstood user needs and missing requirements. As the Turing Award Winner Fred Brooks famously said, „the hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.“ In this talk, I will reflect on how, in my research journey, I tried to tackle this hard challenge by leveraging data science and machine learning to make users and their feedback a first-order concern in software engineering. I will also discuss how Agentic and Generative AI, which is currently reshaping software engineering, can be shaped to effectively address the requirements and design challenge, and conclude by highlighting pitfalls and emerging issues.

About

Walid Maalej is an award-winning software researcher, passionate mentor, and world citizen. Before being recently appointed as a full professor of Software Engineering and AI at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Germany, he was a Professor of Informatics at the University of Hamburg, where he taught software development to up to 700 students in a single room, combining fun activities (such as finger flicking) with pair-programming. His research interests include AI for Software Engineering, Software Engineering for AI, Requirements Engineering, Human Aspects, and Tech Transfer. His work has received four Most Influential Paper Awards, has been cited, a.o., by the UK and US Governments, and has been adopted by multiple large companies, including Siemens and SAP.

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