The public sector is a challenging software engineering domain. Government software systems are highly diverse, covering all aspects of society, including tax collection, social benefits, health care insurance, traffic management, infrastructure, and more. They have a wide variety of (conflicting) stakeholders, and are held publicly accountable.

In The Netherlands, complex Information Technnology (IT) projects of the governemnt must be evaluated by a dedicated “Advisory Council on IT Assessment” (AcICT). Over the past decade, over 125 public reports have appeared. Each report describes the risks and chances of success of a given IT project, and includes recommendations to ministers and parliament on how to proceed. In this presentation I will discuss what we can learn from these 125 reports, and which reportoire of empirical software engineering methods is or is not suitable for this task.

Arie van Deursen is a professor in software engineering at Delft University of Technology. His research interests include software testing, software architecture, human aspects of software engineering, foundation models, and software engineering for the financial and public sector. He was program chair for ESEC/FSE 2017, ICSE 2021, and presently serves as chair of the ICSE steering committee.

Arie van Deursen is a member of the Advisory Council of IT Assessment (AcICT) of the Dutch government, member of the advisory council of ING Bank Netherlands, and an elected member of the Netherlands Academy of Engineering (NAE). Follow him on Mastodon as @avandeursen@mastodon.acm.org.