/ C. L. Nehaniv / Professor
/ Minetada Osano / Associate Professor
/ M. A. M. Capretz / Assistant Professor
The Software Engineering Laboratory aims to integrate new algebraic and formal techniques with emerging software engineering design methodology in order to solve practical problems of software development and maintenance while making effective use of software tools and engineering practice. The development of software systems is now regarded as among the most complex tasks performed by humankind. The problems due to the scale of this complexity affect the costs and time expended on the construction of software systems. After being built, software systems may be unreliable, difficult to use and, even most seriously, their maintenance and evolution are generally frought with unforeseen costs and peril. These problems, together with ever-increasing demand for software systems, comprise the software crisis. Our work spans the frame from requirements capture, design and specification to software maintenance, re-use and evolution.
Lab members lead the Framework for Advanced Software Techniques Research Group, a cooperative project with the Information Systems Laboratory and others. Part of the research aims to develop maintenance process models in order to create a software maintenance environment to recover higher level documentation of existing software systems to bring them into a CASE database. With this mechanism, existing software systems will benefit from forward engineering tools provided by the CASE environment as they are maintained. Sophisticated mathematical methods in our Algebraic Engineering approach to software systems provide a foundation for the object-oriented paradigm and are now being applied in a variety of settings. Dr. Capretz's COMFORM software maintenance environment has been implemented in prototype form on PC, and we are now applying the algebraic engineering formalism to automatic form manipulation in maintenance system management for further software leverage.
The laboratory conducts the Software Engineering Seminar providing the university community with information on current software engineering research, practice and tools.
In addition to lab members and other University of Aizu faculty speakers in the 1995--96 seminars included distinguished guests: R. Matsuda (Ibaraki National University), K. Hashiguchi (Okayama University), Boris Khesin (Yale University), Bruce Rosen (University of Texas, San Antonio), Thomas S. Ray (ATR Laboratories, Japan), Hugo de Garis (ATR Laboratories, Japan), Zhi-Qiang Liu, (The University of Melbourne, Australia), Masami Ito (Kyoto Sangyo University), and others. We also organized the Artificial Life Group in Aizu (ALGA), the Algebraic and Computation Seminar (together with Prof. J. Rhodes of UC Berkeley), and co-organize the University of AIzu Mathematical Sciences Seminar.
Student research in the lab focused on Computational Morphogenesis, Advanced System Administration, Energy and the Environment, and Genetic Algorithms and Adaptive Systems. Lab members promoted the general university computing environment as experts on various help lists, and through the installation and maintenance of various common-use software. This year the SE lab obtained additionally nine powerful Sparc workstations, five personal computers, various printers and CASE tools.