Software Engineering (Computing)

We research across a range of software engineering areas including Empirical Software Engineering, Service-Based Systems, and Software Process Improvement. Some current and recent funded projects are outlined below.

Projects

Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE)
Evidence-Based Practices Informing Computing (EPIC)

These EPSRC-funded projects are investigating the viability of adopting the evidence-based paradigm for software engineering. Although originating in clinical medicine, the evidence-based paradigm has been adopted (and adapted) by a number of other domains that, like software engineering, involve human-centric activities including education, non-clinical branches of healthcare, and librarianship.

The objectives for the EBSE project include:

• determining and codifying appropriate procedures for undertaking systematic reviews of evidence in software engineering;
• creating an infrastructure to support evidence-based software engineering;
• performing and publishing a number of exemplars of systematic reviews.

EPIC is investigating:

• Whether the process of systematic literature review is 'stable'
• The extent and roles of 'grey literature'
• To what extent the extensive and time-consuming SLR process could be approximated (e.g. for PhD students)
• The effectiveness of using 'mapping studies'
• The extent to which current software engineering standards are based upon evidence
• Effective ways of encouraging support for, and adoption of, evidence-based SE practices in industry, commerce and government

SOSoRNet: Service-Oriented Software Research Network

The aim of SOSoRNet, which is funded by EPSRC (PI is Dr. Nicolas Gold, King's College London) is to build an interdisciplinary and self-sustaining international community of researchers and practitioners leading the development and deployment of service-oriented software technologies, and to ensure that this community draws together the many threads and groups active in particular areas of this technology to promote cross-fertilisation of ideas.

The objectives of the network are:

• To provide a forum in which members of the various research and practitioner communities working with service-oriented software can exchange views, ideas, and solutions to the fundamental problems that affect the application of this technology.
• To facilitate, disseminate and lead best practice in the research and deployment of service-oriented software systems.
• To facilitate the identification of new opportunities for the application and development of service-oriented software systems and technologies.

Integration Broker for Heterogeneous Information Sources (IBHIS)

This project was funded under EPSRC's Distributed Information Management (DIM) programme and involved close collaboration between four partners: computer scientists from three universities (Keele, Durham and UMIST), and also Keele's Centre for Health Planning & Management (CHPM). The project set out to address a problem that is becoming increasingly commonplace as more organisations and public bodies store information about individuals in electronic form: namely, how to integrate such information when it is obtained from a set of autonomous and independent organisations, stored in a multiplicity of formats (that may themselves change for structural and organisational reasons), and subject to both national and local rules about access. Our chosen domain was healthcare, where this problem is widely recognised as creating a barrier to the provision of full and effective patient care; however, we have identified many other domains such as criminology, travel, and government policy-making, all of which have information access needs that exhibit very similar characteristics.

To meet the challenge presented by this problem, the project had to address some important technological issues. The development of the service model for software has been progressing for some time, and indeed, now underpins plans for the Grid. In IBHIS, we have successfully adapted, extended and employed service technologies to address the challenge and have brought them together to create a broker that provides a relatively large-scale demonstration of their use. As part of this, we have developed a new model for managing access control in a distributed environment, as well as mechanisms to enable semantic interoperability between data sources and the broker.

CLear and Reliable Information for Integration (CLARiFi) project
 

The objective of CLARIFI was to create a broker infrastructure to support the practical application of component-based software engineering in the marketplace. The overall CLARIFI model of component-based software engineering foresaw the presence of a wide selection of third party components from which developers implement solutions to fulfil customers' needs. Three actors are present in the model: suppliers, integrators, and the broker. The broker supports the integrator by (a) identifying those components that may be used to build the target application, (b) providing standard characteristics for such components, and (c) performing the required trade-off analysis between different possible solutions. The broker supports the supplier by (a) providing a characterisation and certification model, and (b) a potentially greatly enlarged market place. The Broker also supports all users by facilitating the .e-trading. of components using Internet technologies.

News and Events

Members of the Group organise an annual series of conferences on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE). EASE 2008 will be hosted by the University of Bari.

Workshop and tutorial proposals have been submitted to ICSE2008, which will be held in Leipzig.

People

Prof. Pearl Brereton

Prof. Barbara Kitchenham

Stephen Linkman

Dr. Mahmood Niazi

Dr Mark Turner

Research students: Zhi Li, Clive Jeffries, Siffat Ullah Khan