Modern society in today’s digital era depends heavily on software in almost every aspect of daily life. In fact, whenever possible, most hardware implementation is now being replaced by the software counterparts. From the washing machine controllers, mobile phone applications to the sophisticated airplane control systems, the growing dependency on software can be attributed to a number of factors. Unlike hardware, software does not wear out. Thus, the use of software can also help to control maintenance costs. Additionally, software is also malleable and can easily be changed and customized as the need arises. With the advent of advancement in computer hardware technology, software applications grow tremendously in term of line of codes (LOCs) in order to cope with customer demands for new functionalities and innovations. In the old days, there is hardly any commercial software that is more than 15K LOCs. Nowadays, most commercial software typically has more than a million LOCs. For this reason, software development activities are increasingly difficult endeaur.

Addressing some of the aforementioned challenges, Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) has given strong focus on two main research areas namely Requirement Analysis and Design as well as Software Quality Assurances.

Requirement Analysis and Software Design

Requirements analysis and design play very important role in any software lifecycle. It is evident that early detection and correction of problems during requirements stage may result in high quality software at an appreciable cost savings. In this respect, SERG investigates relevant issues related to requirements quality problems that arise in any typical software applications such as inconsistency, incorrectness, incompleteness and ambiguity. Additionally, SERG also investigates requirements problems such as prioritization need, culture and communication issues that occur in global software development particularly on SME business domain. Finally, SERG also explores on sustainable design and high maintainability software that promote low cost solutions mainly through reusability of design patterns and architectural patterns.

Software Quality Assurances

As part of software quality assurances, software configuration management deals with managing of artefacts throughout software lifecycle. As the trend of software development are moving towards geographically dispersed software development teams (i.e. through recent advancement in cloud computing), software configuration management and becomes immensely difficult. For this reason, SERG is now looking into novel techniques and methodology to improve the current state-of-practice.

Apart for software configuration management and maintenance, software testing is also an important activity for software quality assurances. In a nut shell, software testing relates to the process of finding errors/defects and/of ensuring that a particular software of interest meets its specification. One of the key issues within software testing is on the generation of effective test data set for fault detection. Many useful test data generation strategies (e.g. boundary value analysis, cause and effect analysis, decision table, and equivalent partitioning) has been developed over the last 30 years. Although helpful, these strategies have not been sufficiently adequate to generate test data for detecting faults. Taking the aforementioned challenges, SERG strives to develop new strategies for software verification and validation. In particular, SERG is actively pursuing automated test generation for sequence and sequence-less configuration testing as well as for Modified Condition and Decision Coverage.