News

Vasileios Klimis has presented a paper on "Beyond Specification Conformance" at the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering in Rio de Janeiro

It introduces a new way, based on a mathematical logic, that complements specifications to take into account the needs of users to improve the quality of software.

Abstract

We build software to serve people. Yet time and again, systems pass every test, meet every requirement, and still fail the people who use them. Not because of bugs. Not because of careless engineering. But because the software did exactly what it was told -- and what it was told was never the whole story. This work asks a simple but surprisingly hard question: how do we formally measure the gap between what a system does and what people actually expected it to do? I introduce Semantic Expectation Logic (SEL) -- a framework that treats stakeholder expectations as a first-class, formally reasoned artifact. Not buried in a wiki. Not assumed in a style guide. Not whispered in a standup. Formally captured, systematically elicited, and quantifiably tested. SEL does not replace specifications. It addresses what specifications were never designed to hold - the conventions, assumptions, and shared understanding that developers, users, and operators carry in their heads, and that no test suite has ever been written to check. The result is a new way of thinking about software quality. Not just: did we build the system right? But: did we build the right system -- for the people who have to live with it?

Read the Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN) article on the paper.

Read the paper itself.

Reference

Klimis V. Beyond Spec Conformance: A Logic for Validating Stakeholder Expectations. In IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-NIER), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2026.