Software Engineering

How do you get 4th graders (16yo.) to understand software engineering in 1h30? That’s the challenge we (Jérôme Maquoi, Benoît Vanderose and Xavier Devroey) set ourselves on Thursday April 25, 2024. Rather than making them write code, we chose another route: get them to build a 16-floors tower of wooden blocks in under 32 minutes with constraints similar to a software development team in full rush. 😁

The week of April 15, we were in Lisbon for the 46th edition of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024 🇵🇹). Since 1975, ICSE has provided a forum where researchers, developers and educators come together to present and discuss the latest innovations, trends, experiences and problems in the field of software engineering. Given the current state of the art, it’s fair to say that this year was largely devoted to Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. Numerous presentations showed how these can (or cannot) be used to simplify developers’ lives or advance software engineering research. 🤔 In addition to the scientific presentations, ICSE week with its many co-located events is an opportunity to meet the whole software engineering research community in one place and build bridges with other international research groups. Master students in computer science will soon be taking advantage of this for their end-of-study internships, which can be carried out abroad with one of these groups. 😉