The complexity of software systems is growing significantly and will continue to do so across a wide range of application domains including Manufacturing, Telecommunications, Transportation, Internet, Retail, Healthcare, Aerospace, and Energy provision. These types of system are characterized by distribution over heterogeneous networks involving Internet and Intranet technologies and also by ever more demanding and interdependent functional and non-functional requirements such as security, reliability, performance, interoperability and so on.

As a consequence it is becoming increasingly more difficult to efficiently and effectively design, develop and manage many types of complex software system which impacts not only the providers of these systems but also the organizations that they ultimately serve.

The transition of the economy towards a service-oriented business model creates new challenges for the design and management of software systems. This working group is about the extension of development approaches (processes and methods) in a service-oriented environment. It shall determine ways for dealing with these challenges.

Version 1 of the NESSI SRA has already highlighted a number of engineering challenges for engineering software and complex systems. Further work is needed to analyse and develop these challenges and outline an engineering framework able to focus an integrated roadmap of research and development in complex systems and software engineering.

Our objective is to contribute to the development of the NESSI Engineering Framework that will identify and position the different engineering approaches needed for NESSI adoption. The NESSI Engineering Framework is a tool that complements the NESSI (technological) Framework outlined in the SRA; it will serve as a common reference model for articulating the systems and software engineering research roadmap.

Building this engineering framework will require to address a number of topics, the main part of which is provided in the manifesto..