HISC 2023 blog series: interview with Stuart Matthews, Senior Architect at Capgemini Engineering

Posted on August 02, 2023

HISC is now in its tenth year. What trends and technical advances have you seen over the past ten years which impact the trustworthiness of software ecosystems?

One of the most significant trends has been the way that mathematically-based specification and analysis techniques have spread from being a niche technique used only in high-integrity software to their adoption and deployment by some of the world’s biggest technology firms. And furthermore how their at-scale, high-velocity approach to software development and verification has found its way back into the engineering domain, with the adoption of agile and CI/CD practices into our standard toolkits.

What are you most looking forward to at this year’s HISC?

This an exciting year for HISC so it’s hard to pick just one thing! Not only is this our tenth year, but we have several innovations in the conference programme: new members on the committee who I’ve greatly enjoyed working with and the operation of a Call for Presentations which has been very successful. As well as the dozen technical session talks we have two great keynote speakers: Helen Lovekin from the National Cyber Security Centre will be presenting an update on the Principals-Based Assurance initiative, whilst Rod Chapman from Amazon Web Services will talk about AWS' use of automated reasoning - in and about the cloud.

What lessons can we learn from the last ten years, and how can we ensure we build on experience throughout the next ten years?

The need for safety-related systems to be robust against malicious attacks has increased over the last ten years to the point where cyber-security is now a standard requirement for any critical system. Going forwards, innovation in the process, methods and tools that we use particularly for the verification of such systems is going to be essential if we want to improve the overall efficiency and productivity of high-integrity software development.