Myra Cohen

Over the past few decades the complexity of our software systems has grown exponentially. Our software is highly-configurable, interconnected and increasingly mobile. As such, software engineers have turned to nature and evolution for inspiration to help navigate this complexity and ensure software quality. We routinely utilize tools such as genetic algorithms to generate test suites or to refactor code. And these algorithms have become staples for automatically repairing code, for optimizing properties such as energy efficiency, or for transplanting functions from one program into another. At the same time the field of synthetic biology has emerged as a discipline where biological or chemical engineers use living organisms, or their DNA, as computing devices, and through engineering principles program them with new behavior. While these two fields remain distinct, there is an increasing overlap and there are many opportunities for cross-fertilization at their intersection. In this talk I show how our software is becoming more biological, and how living organisms mimic highly-configurable software. I then present some of our recent work along this spectrum from navigating configurability in bioinformatics software, to predicting behavior in organisms, and finally to modeling and assurance of synthetic engineered organisms. I end with the conjecture that these are all organic programs and that assuring their quality is the future of software engineering.