A 2030 Roadmap for Software Engineering

Journal article, 2025

The landscape of software engineering has dramatically changed in recent years. The impressive advances of artificial intelligence are just the latest and most disruptive innovation that has remarkably changed the software engineering research and practice. This special issue shares a roadmap to guide the software engineering community in this confused era. This roadmap is the outcome of a 2-day intensive discussion at the 2030 Software Engineering workshop. The roadmap spotlights and discusses seven main landmarks in the new software engineering landscape: artificial intelligence for software engineering, human aspects of software engineering, software security, verification and validation, sustainable software engineering, automatic programming, and quantum software engineering. This editorial summarizes the core aspects discussed in the 37 papers that comprise the seven sections of the special issue and guides the interested readers throughout the issue. This roadmap is a living body that we will refine with follow-up workshops that will update the roadmap for a series of forthcoming ACM TOSEM special issues.