Software Engineering & Software Metrics Research Projects

Applied Technology Lab Architectural Level Software Metrics Crystal Ball Design, Simulation, Validation and Flight Testing of Adaptive Fault Tolerant Flight Control Systems Intelligent Modeling of UML Scenarios Preventing and Eliminating Software Faults through the Life Cycle Software Metrics for Product Line Architectures

Software engineering covers a well-defined and integrated set of activities to produce
correct, consistent software products effectively and efficiently. Faculty perform
research in many areas some of which include component based development, validation
and verification, software reuse, software portability, user interfaces and graphic
visualization. Research associations exist with the NASA Independent Verification and
Validation Facility, the Institute for Software Research at the West Virginia High-Tech
Consortium and the Concurrent Engineering Research Center.

Evaluating the quality attributes of software architectures has become a major research focus. We recognize that advances in quantitative measurement are crucial to the vitality of the discipline of software engineering. We focus in this project on defining and investigating metrics for software architectures. We wish to define such metrics so as to reflect relevant qualities of software architectures, and to alert the software architect to risks in the early stages of architectural design. We envision that such metrics should be based on a theoretical background, primarily on information theory, and they should be specific to the architectural level especially as it pertains to architecture based software development paradigms. Software reliability is an important part of software quality assurance. We strive to have software that meets both industry and customer standards. Research in this area enables us to develop better software and provide a more robust system.

Fault tolerance is a critical part of software engineering and enables a system to continue its operation when part of the system fails. The term graceful degradation is often used to describe the reduced capabilities of such fault tolerant systems. Research in this area is critical in systems used by NASA, the military and others. In mission critical systems such as flight systems fault tolerance plays an important role in maintaining reliability and availability.

Some of the current research areas are as follows; if you are interested in these areas please feel free to contact the listed faculty members.

• AI for Software Engineering (Dr. Tim Menzies)
• Software Engineering (research conducted by Dr. Bojan Cukic, Dr. Katerina Goseva Popstojanova, Dr. James Mooney, Dr. Y Reddy, Dr. S Reddy, Cynthia Tanner)
• Software Portability (research conducted by Dr. James Mooney)
• Software Specification and Design (research conducted by Dr. Dr. Hany Ammar)



• Software Architecture and Design (research conducted by Dr. Hany Ammar)
• Software Metrics (research conducted by Dr. Hany Ammar)
• Software Risk and Reliability (research conducted by Dr. Bojan Cukic, Dr. Katerina Goseva Popstojanova, Dr. Afzel Noore, Dr. Hany Ammar)



• Fault Tolerance (research conducted by Dr. Katerina Goseva Popstojanova)
• Survivable Systems (research conducted by Dr. Y Reddy)