Software Engineering Research

Overview

The Software Engineering group is primarily interested in research into software maintenance. After all, for every $1 spent on developing a software product, on average $2 or $3 are spent maintaining that product. Maintenance is therefore the most important phase of software production. We are concerned with ways of making software more maintainable. Our research ranges from the theoretical to the experimental; measurement of real-world software is an key feature of our work.

Topics

• The impact of repeated maintenance on maintainability
• Maintainability of open-source software (Linux, GCC, etc.)
• Experimentation to determine whether object orientation promotes maintainability
• Aspect-oriented programming as a maintenance technique
• The effect of coupling on maintainability
• Maintenance-oriented software life-cycle models

Faculty

• Stephen Schach

Research Centers and Laboratories

• Software Engineering Research Group