Better Software Engineering

Software-reliant systems permeate all aspects of modern so-ciety. The resulting interconnectedness and associated com-plexity has resulted in a proliferation of diverse stakeholders with conflicting goals. Thus, contemporary software engi-neering is plagued by incentive conflicts, in settling on de-sign features, allocating resources during the development of products, and allocating computational resources at run-time. In this position paper, we describe some of these problems and outline a research agenda in bridging to the economic theory of mechanism design, which seeks to align incentives in multi-agent systems with private information and conflicting goals. The ultimate goal is to advance a prin-cipled methodology for the design of incentive-compatible approaches to manage the dynamic processes of software engineering