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Specification Engineering: Foundations for the Future of Software Development (Dagstuhl Seminar 25392)

Authors: Marsha Chechik, Eunsuk Kang, Shahar Maoz, Jan Oliver Ringert, and Allison Sullivan

Published in: Dagstuhl Reports, Volume 15, Issue 9 (2026)

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 25392 "Specification Engineering: Foundations for the Future of Software Development". Specifications are an essential component in a variety of tasks in software engineering, including software verification, testing, modeling, requirements engineering, and program synthesis. While producing quality specifications has been a longstanding problem, recent advances in AI technologies, such as large-language models (LLMs), make it a timely problem to address from new perspectives. Automatically generating code from a high-level specification will likely emerge as a dominant paradigm for software development in the future. Thus, being able to write, maintain and evolve high quality specifications - the process of specification engineering - will become an essential skill for software engineers. This Dagstuhl Seminar brought together leading researchers in software engineering and formal methods to identify foundational problems and build a roadmap for specification engineering as a central activity in future development processes.

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Marsha Chechik, Eunsuk Kang, Shahar Maoz, Jan Oliver Ringert, and Allison Sullivan. Specification Engineering: Foundations for the Future of Software Development (Dagstuhl Seminar 25392). In Dagstuhl Reports, Volume 15, Issue 9, pp. 160-182, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@Article{chechik_et_al:DagRep.15.9.160,
  author =	{Chechik, Marsha and Kang, Eunsuk and Maoz, Shahar and Ringert, Jan Oliver and Sullivan, Allison},
  title =	{{Specification Engineering: Foundations for the Future of Software Development (Dagstuhl Seminar 25392)}},
  pages =	{160--182},
  journal =	{Dagstuhl Reports},
  ISSN =	{2192-5283},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{15},
  number =	{9},
  editor =	{Chechik, Marsha and Kang, Eunsuk and Maoz, Shahar and Ringert, Jan Oliver and Sullivan, Allison},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagRep.15.9.160},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-249761},
  doi =		{10.4230/DagRep.15.9.160},
  annote =	{Keywords: formal methods, software assurance, software specification, specification engineering}
}

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Specification Engineering: Foundations for the Future of Software Development (Dagstuhl Seminar 25392)

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