SOFTWARE INTENSIVE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Group Leader
A/Prof Chris Johnson

Other Researchers
Dr Clive Boughton, Ms Rainbow Cai, Dr Shayne Flint, Ms Lynette Johns-Boast, Adjunct Professor Stephen Mellor, Dr Ramesh Sankaranarayana

Current Graduate Students
Mithun Alexander, Ziyad Abdulaziz Alshaikh, Normi Sham Awang Abu Bakar, Zoe Brain, Srinivas Chemboli, Agung Fatwanto, Luke Nguyen-Hoan, Alvin Teh and Derek Wang

Mission

To apply our combined industrial and academic experience to identify, create and transfer theory and technology which increases the effectiveness of Software- Intensive Systems engineering practice.

Software-Intensive Systems are systems of interacting people, technology and processes that have a critical reliance on software. Examples include national security, health, education, transport, telecommunications and scientific systems, many of which are vital to modern society. In addition to their scale and complexity, a key characteristic of such systems is that their development, operation and improvement are inherently multi-disciplinary activities.

The CECS Software-Intensive Systems group develops innovative and effective multi- disciplinary methodologies and associated technology to improve the understanding, development and operation of software-intensive systems. Initial ideas are inspired by software, systems and requirements engineering, knowledge management, modeling, environmental science, psychology, management and other disciplines in both a research and industrial context. We use the group’s years of industrial experience to guide the evolution of these ideas into industrially relevant practices.

Along with our research activities, the group delivers a comprehensive program of software and systems engineering education at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Collaborations

See Project Descriptions below.

Current Grants

Tim Jones, David Hawking and Ramesh Sankaranarayana have won a Google Research Award worth US$20000 for their proposal Measuring the Impact of Web Spam on Search Quality.

Major Facilities

None

Project Descriptions

Group research is organised into three integrated themes supported by an active program of recruitment, mentoring and career development. Theme 1 represents a long term, field changing research perspective, while Theme 2 represents a shorter term, more conventional perspective on improving software-intensive systems engineering practice. Theme 3 relates to improving education practices and education as a means of transferring our research results into industry, government and scientific practice.

Theme 1: Helping scientists ‘do more science'

• DCS academics
  Clive Boughton, Shayne Flint and Ramesh Sankaranarayana
• Graduate Students
  Ziyad Abdulaziz Alshaikh, Srinivas Chemboli and Luke Nguyen-Hoan
• Collaborators
  Geoff Cary and Ian Davies (ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society), Jacques Gignoux (Department of Biology, Ecole Normale Supérieure) and the Cooperative Research Centre for Advanced Automotive Technology (AutoCRC)

Modern science is a software-intensive system. Scientists spend much of time developing, acquiring, modifying and running the software they need to do their research. This theme is about minimising the time and resources required to develop scientific software, so that scientists can do what they do best - science.

We are taking a two-pronged approach to this work. Firstly, we are looking at conventional technology adoption and transfer issues within the scientific community. Secondly, we are developing new model-driven engineering paradigms aimed at delivering order of magnitude increases in complex software-intensive systems engineering productivity.

To date, our work has resulted in the development of Aspect-Oriented Thinking (AOT). This approach has a strong focus on the development and assembling of autonomous systems, capability, knowledge and other elements to form the systems required to both learn about and improve complex problem situations. The approach is currently being developed and evaluated within a number of different domains and reflects our research group’s strong industrial background by supporting the actual implementation, operation and maintenance of real software-intensive systems within contemporary scientific and industrial contexts.

This work may have longer term implications for industrial practice, but for now, the focus is on scientific computing.

Theme 2: Increasing the industrial adoption of software engineering technology

• DCS academics
  Clive Boughton, Shayne Flint, Lynette Johns-Boast, Chris Johnson and Ramesh Sankaranarayana
• Graduate Students
  Mithun Alexander, Normi Sham Awang Abu Bakar, Zoe Brain, Agung Fatwanto, Alvin Teh and Derek Wang
• Collaborators
  Boris Bizumic (ANU School of Psychology), AutoCRC, Software Improvements and GeoScience Australia

This theme draws on our group's combined industrial and academic experience to make a real difference to industrial practice using existing software and systems engineering knowledge.

Areas of interest include: software architecture, impact of design complexity, the design process, software measurements, model-driven software development, software engineering education and human aspects of software engineering. Application domains include automobiles, electronic voting, open source software development, web services, ubiquitous computing, geographic information systems and ecological simulations.

Theme 3: Advancing software-intensive systems engineering education

• DCS academics
  Clive Boughton, Shayne Flint, Lynette Johns-Boast, Chris Johnson and Ramesh Sankaranarayana
• Graduate Students
  Starting in 2009
• Collaborators
  Boris Bizumic (ANU School of Psychology), Jerry Corrigan (ANU School of Medicine), ANU Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods (CEDAM)

This theme addresses a need to increase the knowledge and use of software development best practice within multi-disciplinary industrial and scientific communities. We are looking at different ways of structuring and managing curricula, the use of Aspect-Oriented Thinking to assemble courses in an agile and adaptive manner, the development of multi-disciplinary undergraduate group project courses and novel approaches to course delivery and assessment.