Manifesto

VERSEN proposes a “Manifesto on Software Research and Education in the Netherlands”. The full manifesto can be downloaded here. There is also an excerpt available.

The manifesto has been covered in the I/O Magazine (find the actual publication here, March edition). Please find the excerpt from I/O magazine here.

Endorsements

• “The VERSEN manifesto hopes to inspire software researchers, yet I find it also provokes me as a software developer. All challengers are very recognisable from personal experience, but very rarely do I actively attempt to address them at this level. I feel motivated to do that more regularly, hopefully with the help of equally inspired researchers.” — Jeroen Heijmans, RWS

• “I endorse VERSEN’s manifesto on Software Research and Education in the Netherlands, because I share the urgency for investing in software engineering knowledge and skills. More and more organizations are being digitally disrupted and losing their competitive edge, simply because they lack talented engineers. Consequently, these organizations build up substantial technical debt that will in the end negatively impact the value they deliver to their customers and employees.” — Rik Farenhorst, Independent consultant

• “At ICTU, we develop custom software for our colleagues at other Dutch governmental organizations, with a strong focus on quality. High quality software development not only requires flexible and scalable development and test environments, but also many tools, ranging from tools to build and test the software to tools to verify security, performance, and accessibility. An important challenge is how to deliver this ecosystem of environments and tools to development teams in an effective, efficient, and secure way. We’re happy to see these challenges listed in the Manifesto on Software Research and Education and hope to cooperate in and benefit from the research.” — Dr. Frank Niessink, Quality manager at ICTU

• “Software engineering is a quickly evolving discipline that continues to benefit from fundamental research and academic education. At the same time, future generations of software engineers will have to deal with ever-growing amounts of operational software. I am therefore happy to see that the Software Manifesto puts the focus on topics that are relevant in practice, such as software reliability, maintainability, and development efficiency. It is paramount that future software engineers are trained both in computer science fundamentals, and in up-to-date engineering methods to help improve the software landscape of the future.” — Dr. Magiel Bruntink, Head of Research at Software Improvement Group

• “I strongly believe that we should look at developing secure software as a craft and culture by investing in software engineers helping them to learn and use the right skills. I also believe that secure software should elevate from a standalone technical concern to an enterprise issue when organizations are developing and/or acquiring software. One of the goals of the Secure Software Alliance is to help software engineers more effectively engage their leaders and executives to build and maintain more secure software. Therefore, I endorse this manifesto to invest in software engineering knowledge and skills.” — Danny Onwezen, Chairman Secure Software Alliance