Rethinking Software Engineering in the Era of Foundation Models: A Curated Catalogue of Challenges in the Development of Trustworthy FMware
Ahmed E. Hassan, Dayi Lin, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Keheliya Gallaba, Filipe R. Cogo, Boyuan Chen, Haoxiang Zhang, Kishanthan Thangarajah, Gustavo A. Oliva, Jiahuei Lin, Wali Mohammad Abdullah, Zhen Ming Jiang
Abstract
Foundation models (FMs), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have revolutionized software development by enabling new use cases and business models. We refer to software built using FMs as FMware. The unique properties of FMware (e.g., prompts, agents and the need for orchestration), coupled with the intrinsic limitations of FMs (e.g., hallucination) lead to a completely new set of software engineering challenges. Based on our industrial experience, we identified ten key SE4FMware challenges that have caused enterprise FMware development to be unproductive, costly, and risky. For each of those challenges, we state the path for innovation that we envision. We hope that the disclosure of the challenges will not only raise awareness but also promote deeper and further discussions, knowledge sharing, and innovative solutions.