Graduate Studies in Software Engineering

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Graduate Studies inSoftware Engineering
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What is Software Engineering?

• Solving customers problems by the disciplined
  development of large applications
• Applying engineering methods to software
• Some areas of SE knowledge and research
• Software defects cost upwards of 60 Billion per
  year
• Productivity of developers and management teams
  ranges dramatically
• How can we improve software engineering in order
  to cut the cost to society of poor quality and
  excessive development?

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Using Collaborations and their Composition for
Requirements Modeling in Distributed Systems

• Gregor Bochmann
• Objectives
• Compose collaborations according to rules of
  sequential or concurrent execution
• Derive protocols to implement the requirements
• Research questions
• Under which conditions can two collaborations be
  combined?
• How can contradictions be reconciled?
• How can you build tools to derive designs from
  requirements?

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Supporting Use Case based Requirements Engineering

• Stéphane Somé
• With Daniel Amyot, Gregor Bochmann and Amy Felty
• 5 students
• Objective
• Create an environment for use case capture,
  analysis and validation
• Research questions
• Can use cases be formalized while remaining
  user-oriented?
• Can we automate behaviour synthesis from use
  cases?
• Can we automate validation against use cases?
• Results
• Open source tool at http//sourceforge.net/project
  s/uced/
• A UML metamodel for use case description
• A Restricted natural language for use cases
• Algorithms for state model synthesis from use
  cases
• Algorithms for test scenario derivation

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Evolving E-Health Business Processes Around
Accessible Data Warehouses

• Daniel Amyot
• With Liam Peyton, Michael Weiss (Carleton), Greg
  Richards (Management), Alan Forster (Medicine)
• 8 students
• Objective
• Integrate performance management and business
  process automation, in a model-driven manner
• Results
• A test framework and sample scenarios for
  E-Health processes
• A process and data simulation environment for
  Ottawa Hospital
• A framework for compliance of business processes
  to legislation
• Combined Key Performance Indicators with process
  models

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User Requirements Notation (URN) Modelling,
Analysis and Transformations

• Daniel Amyot
• With Gregor Bochmann, Stéphane Somé
• 3 profs from Carleton, and 4 students
• Objective
• Integrate scenarios and goals to improve
  requirements modelling and analysis (URN UCM
  GRL)
• Results
• Scenario analysis and goal analysis algorithms
• Open source, Eclipse-based tool support (jUCMNav)
• Transformations from UCMs (Use Case Maps) to
  other formalisms
• Prototype for aspect-oriented UCM and GRL
• Integration of URN with a commercial requirements
  tool
• Applications to business process modelling,
  requirements engineering, pattern formalization,
  and performance analysis

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Formal Aspects of Software Testing

• Guy-Vincent Jourdan
• With Hasan Ural
• Objective
• Extend the foundations of testing and other
  formal techniques to provide assurance that
  software systems work as expected
• Research questions
• How can we prove the "equivalence" between a
  model and an implementation with a test sequence
  that is as short as possible?
• How can we significantly reduce the number of
  tests in a test suite, without significantly
  reduce its coverage?
• How to can we do adaptive testing, with test
  sequences chosen on the fly based on observed
  results?

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Software Correctness and Safety

• Amy Felty
• With Stan Matwin and Luigi Logrippo (UQO)
• 5 students
• Objective
• Provide assurance that complex software systems
  work correctly and safely, by studying the
  application of theorem proving and other related
  formal techniques
• Sample Result
• Recently developed an approach to detect a large
  class of unwanted conflicts among features in
  telecommunications and other large software
  systems

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Privacy-Compliance in B2B Networks

• Liam Peyton
• With Abed El Saddik, Carlisle Adams and Bernard
  Stepien (Researcher)
• 3 students
• Objective
• To manage privacy compliance while enabling
  distributed data sharing and data mining
• Results
• Identified gaps in existing technology standards
  (P3P, EPAL, Liberty Alliance)
• Proposed audit trail service (Information
  Transfer Registry)
• Service Oriented Architecture framework for data
  sharing in on-line collaboration environments

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Complexity Reduction in Software Engineering
(CRuiSE)

• Tim Lethbridge
• 2 students
• Objective
• Enable software engineers to develop more easily
• Research questions
• What are the sources of complexity in the SE
  process, and how can we reduce them
• How can we bridge the gap between programming and
  modeling
• What are the obstacles to a model-centric
  approach?
• Why do many industrial software engineers still
  consider writing code to be their central
  activity?
• How can modeling languages and tools be made more
  usable?

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Improving Software Engineering Education

• Tim Lethbridge
• Objective
• Improve the quality of the software engineering
  workforce through education
• Research questions
• What are the areas of software engineering where
  education is most lacking?
• How do we structure curricula and certification
  tests so software engineers can produce better
  software?