On Turning Domain Knowledge into Tools

Jean-Marc Jézéquel is a Professor at the University of Rennes, member of the Diverse team at IRISA/Inria Rennes and Director of IRISA, one of the largest public research lab in Informatics in France.

His interests include model driven software engineering for software product lines, and specifically component based, dynamically adaptable systems with quality of service constraints, including security, reliability, performance, timeliness etc. He is the author of 4 books and of more than 300 publications in international journals and conferences. He was a member of the steering committees of the AOSD and MODELS conference series. He is currently Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE Computer and of the Journal on Software and System Modeling, as well as member of the editorial boards of the Journal on Software and Systems, and the Journal of Object Technology. He received an engineering degree from Telecom Bretagne in 1986, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Rennes, France, in 1989. In 2016 he received the Silver Medal from CNRS.

One of the biggest challenges of the digital age is to turn human knowledge, know-how and procedures into software. When the domain of expertise is close enough to computer science, software engineers typically can manage it because they can understand the full spectrum of the problems, ranging from the problem domain (how to do the right thing) to the solution space in the computer (how to do the thing right).

However, when the domain stands far away from the software engineer's expertise, it is much more difficult to do the right thing. A lot of approaches have been developed over the years to handle this gap. In this talk we reflect on one of these approaches, based on the idea of using models to capture domain knowledge at the right level of abstraction, and software tools to transform these models into technical solutions. In this paradigm, the mission of software engineers becomes providing the domain experts with the right tool-supported modeling languages that is, turning domain knowledge into tools.