Human-Centered Specification-Driven Software Engineering with Generative AI

Project description

The project researches a specification-driven approach to software development, aiming to leverage generative AI to empower individuals without programming or software development skills to create functional and reliable software. The key design principle is that individuals can express and describe their requirements in an interactive dialogue with an AI-based tool, resulting in a natural language specification. These specifications will document ideas, goals, purposes, functionality, and appearance and will serve as a foundation for automatically generating software architectures, application code, and tests. The approach combines a high level of abstraction with sufficient detail to ensure flexibility and scalability, overcoming limitations of current low-code platforms and visual programming environments.

Through a co-creation process, users iteratively develop and refine specifications, supported by generative AI to ensure clarity, completeness, and alignment with their intent. By enabling a broader and more diverse group of individuals to actively design and construct digital systems, this project aims to democratize software development and contribute to digital sovereignty. We expect empowering individuals to create software themselves fosters trust in technology and gives them the ability to shape their digital realities.

The project employs a human-centered research approach to explore user needs and concerns, prototype and validate tools, and test them in realistic environments. Engaging with user groups such as scientific domain experts, self-taught developers, and students, the project will deliver a robust framework for specification-driven software development, intuitive tools, and empirical studies demonstrating their utility. The project aims to increase digital literacy, drive innovation, and promote inclusivity.

Project team