Session details: Onward! film presentations

Abstract

It is my pleasure to welcome you to Onward! Film. The goal of this track is to explore new developments in how film and other narrative technologies can be used to enrich software development. Digital multimedia technology now plays a key role across a wide spectrum of information technology - not only in deployed systems, but also in the development of systems. Since the inception in 2006, the organizers of the Onward! film track have believed that film can play a significant role in the development process. Film can show the interactive nature of a proposed system in a way that goes well beyond the expressiveness of requirements specifications and use-case diagrams. Film can reveal how a proposed system should or might work, can describe exceptional circumstances in which a system must work. There is also an increasing need of describing research projects whose results are difficult to explain to non-experts. The execution of long-living complex systems often stretches into months, even years, and a film is more helpful than a real-time demo to explain their behavior. Moreover, film can be used as visual scaffolding of how software engineering is conducted in order to help us improve the software development process itself. With the advance of powerful but easy to use digital video tools, low cost storage, the advance of YouTube and other cloud services, film is now increasingly a medium of choice for the description of software sytems.