Literature about design suggests that a variety of alternatives leads to a higher quality final design. When software designers, either individually or together, are designing in front of the whiteboard, they rarely explore different solution alternatives. How can we help designers to explore more design alternatives for software problems? To achieve this, we are working on a process to facilitate designers to collaborate and produce high quality software designs while considering more solution alternatives.
Given the availability of large-scale source-code repositories, there have been a large number of applications for clone detection. Unfortunately, despite a decade of active research, there is a marked lack in clone detectors that scale to large software repositories. In particular for detecting near-miss clones where significant editing activities may take place in the cloned code.
COVERT is a tool for compositional verification of Android inter-application vulnerabilities. It automatically identifies vulnerabilities that occur due to the interaction of apps comprising a system. Subsequently, it determines whether it is safe for a bundle of apps, requiring certain permissions and potentially interacting with each other, to be installed together.
The Alloy specification language, and the corresponding Alloy Analyzer, have received much attention in the last two decades with applications in many areas of software engineering. Increasingly, formal analyses enabled by Alloy are desired for use in an on-line mode, where the specifications are automatically kept in sync with the running, possibly changing, software system. However, given Alloy Analyzer's reliance on computationally expensive SAT solvers, an important challenge is the time it takes for such analyses to execute at runtime.
The rising popularity of mobile apps deployed on battery-constrained devices has motivated the need for effective energy-aware testing techniques. Energy testing is generally more labor intensive and expensive than functional testing, as tests need to be executed in the deployment environment, specialized equipment needs to be used to collect energy measurements, etc. Currently, there is a dearth of automatic mobile testing techniques that consider energy as a program property of interest.
Computer games may well be the quintessential domain for software engineering R&D. Why? Modern multi-player online games (MMOG) must address core issues in just about every major area of Computer Science and SE research and education.
This research focuses on techniques for identifying and reducing the costs, streamlining the process, and improving the readiness of future workforce for the acquisition of complex software systems. Emphasis is directed at identifying, tracking, and analyzing software component costs and cost reduction opportunities within acquisition life cycle of open architecture (OA) systems, where such systems combine best-of-breed software components and software products lines (SPLs) that are subject to different intellectual property (IP) license requirements.
ISR
