An Immersive Future for Software Engineering — Avenues and Approaches

Software systems are increasingly becoming more intricate and complex, necessitating new ways to be able to comprehend and visualize them. At the same time, the nature of software engineering teams itself is changing with people playing more fluid roles often needing seamless and contextual intelligence, for faster and better decisions. Moreover, the next-generation of software engineers will all be post-millennials, which may have totally different expectations from their software engineering workplace. Thus, we believe that it is important to have a re-look at the way we traditionally do software engineering and immersive technologies have a huge potential here to help out with such challenges. However, while immersive technologies, devices and platforms, have matured in past few years, there has been very little research on studying how these technologies can influence software engineering. In this paper, we introduce how traditional software engineering can leverage immersive approaches for building, delivering and maintaining next-generation software applications. As part of our initial research, we present an augmented-reality based prototype for project managers, which provides contextual and immersive insights. Finally, we also discuss important research questions that we are investigating further as part of our immersive software engineering research.