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This panel addresses the emerging technologies fordeveloping the network software. A s networking technology has made great progress in its speed and connectivity in past twenty years, network software has also evolved and m a n y technologies have been tried and applied t o network software development. Formal methods provide model verification, and some sorts of automatic program generation and artificial intelligence open the new arena of intelligent network software. Object-oriented technology is comming into practice and enhances the maintenability and reuse of software. Recently, emerging technologies such as distributed objects, mobile agents, Java and network programming will redefine the concept of network software and its development methodology. Commemorating the twentieth C O M P S A C , this panel summarizes these twenty years' experience and discusses future directions of network software development. BackgroundFor only a few years, communications networks have been re-defined. We have witnessed three tidal waves in the telecommunications software. e Explosion of the Internet and network computing So called network computing or Web-based architecture changes the design of applications. e Widespread of mobile communications Mobility enhances the usability but adds extra complexity to software development. So called CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) comes into real life and the computing and communication are merging. e Downsizing of telecommunication systems 2 View Points e Rapid Application Development Now, time-to-market is the competitive edge in telecommunications software development too[l]. Conventional development process and methodology are unable to meet this demands. Instead of building applications from scratch, objectoriented technologies are making software reuse practical. For example, we have experienced that application frameworks remarkably reduced both cost and time in the development of network management systems[2]. An object-oriented software architecture, T I N A Telecommunications Information Network Arc b itecture) is under development for providing intelligent network services. e Flexibility Fat and monolithic software architecture is obsolete. It's unable to keep up with the rapid change of both customers' demands and development technologies. We need flexible and modular software architecture. Network-based componetware and distributed objects are emerging. These technologies allow us to build and change applications o n the fly. The distinction between computing and communication applications faded away. Telecommunication network can and have to provide many more new services while the variety of the services are widening. Development of such network services is a challenge. Distributed computing and mixing real-timeness and non-real-timeness are critical issues too. Conventional methodology i s unable to effectively design and verify such complex applications. It's time to re-engineer the development methodology for network software. e Variety

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