Awareness and Comprehension in Software/Systems Engineering Practice and Education: Trends and Research Directions

The creation of tools, techniques and methodologies to support the manipulation of large data sets has been receiving special attention of both scientific and industrial communities, in order to discover new ways of dealing with the underlying information, including learning purposes, identification of patterns, decision making support, amongst others. However, making use of computing resources to enhance awareness and understanding of software information and the software itself is still a challenge in software/systems engineering, since it involves the identification of suitable mechanisms, adequate abstractions, and studies on stimulation of the human perceptive and cognitive abilities. This paper presents some of the challenges in this context, based on current trends of software development lifecycle, program comprehension, and software engineering education. At the end, a special focus is given on ongoing research on using and improving current mechanisms for supporting software reuse practices and software comprehension in general.