IT department seminar

Integrating AI into contemporary software systems engineering

Technological innovation continues to reshape the software development landscape, introducing new paradigms and challenges that require fresh thinking and adaptive strategies. Artificial intelligence (AI) is among the most transformative forces. While AI is not a new concept, its recently increased accessibility, thanks to powerful data infrastructures, advanced algorithms and scalable processing capabilities, has transformed it from a theoretical concept to a practical tool that enhances human performance in everyday tasks.

One of the most dynamic fields affected by AI is contemporary software systems engineering. Despite the hype surrounding AI-assisted code generation and evaluation, it's essential to recognize that coding represents only a fraction of the software engineering life cycle. Activities such as requirements specification, system design, validation, testing, deployment and maintenance are just as essential, and often more complex. These steps involve administrative, analytical and creative tasks that lend themselves perfectly to augmentation by AI, but they remain underexplored in terms of risk, feasibility and impact.

This presentation aims to share our experience of AI adoption in real-world software projects. Observations from a recent healthcare project support the discussion. A SWEBOK bare development process (specification, design, coding, quality assurance) was used to guide build activities. A series of rapid multivocal reviews corroborated the findings of AI-based technologies. The results were positive, despite the scarcity of pragmatic AI technologies when working on specifications, design and quality assurance. However, the observations reinforced the need to have human intervention in the loop when performing knowledge-intensive activities.

Professor Guilherme Horta Travassos is a leading researcher in software engineering at COPPE/UFRJ.

He holds a PhD in systems engineering and has carried out postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland and NASA/SEL.

He specializes in experimental software engineering, software quality, IoT, AI-based development and context-aware systems.

He leads the experimental software engineering group at COPPE, contributes to ISERN and sits on the editorial boards of prestigious journals such as IST and JSERD.

Professor Travassos actively builds bridges between academia and industry through successful R&D collaborations. He is a researcher at CNPq and FAPERJ CNE. For more information, visit www.cos.ufrj.br/~ght.