Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering: Concepts and Principles

TL;DR

This paper introduces Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering (IOSE), a new approach tailored for open sociotechnical systems where interactions among autonomous principals define the system, contrasting with traditional centralized software engineering.

Contribution

The paper proposes IOSE as a novel framework that reinterprets classical SE principles to better suit systems with autonomous social participants and interaction protocols.

Findings

IOSE effectively models sociotechnical systems with autonomous principals.

Traditional SE methodologies often fail to address the interaction-centric nature of sociotechnical systems.

IOSE aligns system specifications with social interactions rather than centralized artifacts.

Abstract

Following established tradition, software engineering today is rooted in a conceptually centralized way of thinking. The primary SE artifact is a specification of a machine -- a computational artifact -- that would meet the (elicited and) stated requirements. Therein lies a fundamental mismatch with (open) sociotechnical systems, which involve multiple autonomous social participants or principals who interact with each other to further their individual goals. No central machine governs the behaviors of the various principals. We introduce Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering (IOSE) as an approach expressly suited to the needs of open sociotechnical systems. In IOSE, specifying a system amounts to specifying the interactions among the principals as protocols. IOSE reinterprets the classical software engineering principles of modularity, abstraction, separation of concerns, and encapsulation in a manner that accords with the realities of sociotechnical systems. To highlight the novelty of IOSE, we show where well-known SE methodologies, especially those that explicitly aim to address either sociotechnical systems or the modeling of interactions among autonomous principals, fail to satisfy the IOSE principles.