semat semat software engineering method and theory is an initiative to reshape software engineering such that software engineering qualifies as a rigorous discipline the initiative was launched in december 2009 by ivar jacobson bertrand meyer and richard soley the initiative was envisioned as a multiyear effort for bridging the gap between the developer community and the academic community and for creating a community giving value to the whole software community the work is now structured in four different but strongly related areas the practice area the education area the theory area and the community area the practice area primarily addresses practices the education area is concerned with all issues related to training for both the developers and the academics including students the theory area is primarily addressing the search for a general theory in software engineering finally the community area works with setting up legal entities creating websites and community growth it was expected that the practice area the education area and the theory area would at some point in time integrate in a way of value to all of them the practice area would be a customer of the theory area and direct the research to useful results for the developer community the theory area would give a solid and practical platform for the practice area and the education area would communicate the results in proper ways the practice area the first step was here to develop a common ground or a kernel including the essence of software engineering things we always have always do always produce when developing software the second step was envisioned to add value on top of this kernel in the form of a library of practices to be composed to become specific methods specific for all kinds of reasons such as the preferences of the team using it kind of software being built etc the first step is as of this writing just about to be concluded the results are a kernel including universal elements for software development called the essence kernel and a language called the essence language to describe these elements and elements built on top of the kernel practices methods and more essence including both the kernel and language has been published as an omg standard in beta status in july 2013 and is expected to become a formally adopted standard in early 2014 the second step has just started and the practice area will be divided into a number of separate but interconnected track the practice library track the tool track are so far identified and work has started or is about to get started the practice track is currently working on a users guide to help software practitionersstudents practicemethod authors and tool builders in the use of essence this guide will contain scenarios demonstrating how teams can use the essence kernel to assess where they are and where they need to focus next independent of their chosen method and life cycle scenarios are also being developed to show teams how they can assess their current practices looking for gaps and potential overlaps the users guide will also contain a practice development guide to help both practice authors and practitioners create and update practices and methods the education area the area focuses on leveraging the work of semat in software engineering education both within academia and industry it promotes global education based on a common ground called essence the areas target groups are instructors such as university professors and industrial coaches as well as their students and learning practitioners the goal of the area is to create educational courses and course materials that are internationally viable identify pedagogical approaches that are appropriate and effective for specific target groups and disseminate experience and lessons learned the area includes members from a number of universities and institutes worldwide including in alphabetical ordercarnegie mellon university silicon valley free university of bozen bolzano kth royal institute of technology universidad nacional de colombia university of duisburgessen university of oslo waseda universitynational institute of informatics wits university johannesburg and more most members have already been involved in leveraging aspects of semat in the context of their software engineering courses they are gathering their resources and starting a common venture towards defining a new generation of sematpowered software engineering curricula the theory area an important part of semat is that a general theory of software engineering is planned to emerge as argued extensively elsewhere eg in the ieee software article wheres the theory for software engineering the benefits of such theories are significant a series of workshops held under the title semat workshop on a general theory of software engineering gtse are a key component in awareness building around general theories in addition to community awareness building semat also aims to contribute with a specific general theory of software engineering this theory should be solidly based on the semat essence language and kernel and should support software engineering practitioners goaloriented decision making as argued elsewhere such support is predicated on the predictive capabilities of the theory thus the semat essence should be augmented to allow the prediction of critical software engineering phenomena sample questions that the theory aims to answer including the following ahow will project success be affected by changing the way of working bhow will project success be affected by changing the team structure and characteristics chow will project success be affected by changing the content and form of the requirements dhow will project success be affected by changing the gtse workshop series assists in the development of the semat general software engineering theory by engaging a larger community in the search for development of and evaluation of promising theories which may be used as a base for the semat theory organization structure main organization semat is chaired by sumeet s malhotra of tata consultancy services the ceo of the organization is ste nadin of fujitsu the executive management committee of semat consists of ivar jacobson ste nadin sumeet s malhotra paul e mcmahon michael goedicke and cecile peraire japan chapter japan chapter was established in april 2013 and it has more than 250 members as of november 2013 several organizations including waseda university are considering to include semat in their education and training courses member activities have just started carrying out seminars about semat considering utilization of semat essence for integrating different requirements engineering techniques and body of knowledges boks and translating articles into japanese japanese translations of semat kernel cards essence article and vision statement are already available on the chapters web site httpwwwsematjp korea chapter lg electronics sk telecom samsung sds daewoo shipbuilding marine engineering national information society agency are among about 50 members of the chapter inaugurated in october 2013 member activities have just started 2e consulting started rewriting their it service engagement methods using the essence kernel and uengine solutions started developing a tool to orchestrate essencekernel based practices into a project method korean government supported kaist to conduct research in essence visit httpsematkoreaorg latin american chapter semat latin american chapter was created in august 2011 in medellin colombia by ivar jacobson during the latin american software engineering symposium this chapter has 9 executive committee members coming from colombia venezuela peru brazil argentina chile and mexico chaired by dr carlos zapata from colombia more than 80 people signed the initial declaration of the chapter and nowadays the chapter members are in charge of disseminating the semat ideas in all latin america in fact the chapter members have participated in some of the most important latin american conferences including the latin american conference on informatics clei and the chilean computing meeting ecc the chapter played a crucial role in the submission sent in response to the omg call for proposals and currently is devoted to the study of didactical strategies for teaching the semat kernel by games theoretical studies about some kernel elements and practical representations of several software development and quality methods by using the semat kernel some of the members also translated the essence book now in press and some other semat materials and papers into spanish russia chapter russian chapter has about 20 members a few universities have incorporated semat in their training courses in two conferences actual problems of system and software engineering and secr with semat section and articles translation of the essence book into russian is in progress endorsers a significant number of worldclass experts in the field of software engineering endorse the initiatives call for action the signatories include scott ambler dines bjrner barry boehm erich gamma ken schwaber sumeet malhotra etc the initiative is also supported by corporations such as tcs bosch sap oracle ibm microsoft ericsson abb and samsung and academic institutions such as peking university chalmers university of technology florida atlantic university wits university and kaist some of the signatories are known in the field for well established software engineering models or methods which are not always compatible yet the consensus on the initiative shows that they agree with the importance of refounding software engineering practical applications of semat ideas developed by the semat community have been successfully applied in the real world by both industry and academia examples from the industry are munichre have assembled a family of collaboration models to cover the whole spectrum of software and application work four collaboration models exploratory standard maintenance and support have been built on the same kernel from the same set of 12 practices fujitsu services have built apt toolkit based on the early version of the softwareengineering kernel this toolkit covers both agile and waterfall ways of working kpn a kernelbased process by more than 300 projects across 13 programs as part of a move to iterative development and unifying qa process to apply to all projects regardless of the methods or practices used software engineering kernel developed by the semat is also used in software engineering courses at kth royal institute of technology tools supporting semat the first tool that supported the authoring and development of semat practices based on a kernel was the esswork practice workbench tool provided by ivar jacobson international the practice workbench tool was made available to the semat community in june 2012 and is now publicly available and free to use the practice workbench is an integrated practice development environment with support for collaborative practice and method development key features of the practice workbench include interactive presentation of the essence kernel practice authoring and extension using the essence language method composition innovative cardbased representation publication of methods practices and kernels as cardbased html websites export to the esswork deployment environment another publicly available tool initiative is the sematacc the essence accelerator system this tool is designed to speed up the learning of essence theory in software engineering and to easily test it with any software project semat website the semat initiative a call for action why we need a theory for software engineering methods need theory semat software engineering method and theory semat vision statement the essence of software engineering the semat kernel software portal 