Lecture: Complex Networks in Software Systems

Marc Roper will be giving a lecture on “Complex Networks in Software Systems – A Challenge to Complexity Scientists” on Friday 23rd January at the Institute for Advanced Studies as part of its “Complex Networks across the Natural and Technological Sciences” event.

Graphs are used extensively within computer science and software engineering to represent a wide range of network relationships – from internal data and control dependencies within a program, to workflow and process dependencies within the development life-cycle. One common factor in complex software engineering projects is the sheer scale of such network graphs, potentially consisting as they do of millions of nodes and edges. The aim of this talk is to review the uses of network graphs within different aspects of software engineering and outline some of the approaches we have taken in trying to manage such large and complex entities in a range of different contexts. It also raises the question of whether any of the techniques employed by complexity scientists can be used to address the problems presented by complex software systems.

For more details, see: here

Congratulations to Richard Glassey

Subject to minor corrections, Richard Glassey has successfully defended his PhD thesis.

Congratulations to Inah Omoronyia

Congratulations to Inah Omoronyia who has just defended his PhD thesis with style. Just a few minor corrections to be made.

Inah has been awarded a 12 month ERCIM post-doc fellowship and will be leaving for NTNU in Norway in early January.

Congratulations to Dr. Stewart

Congratulations from the group to Johnny, who has been awarded his doctorate after a successful defence of his PhD.

MPAC 2008

Sotirios Terzis is the chair of the 6th International Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-Hoc Computing (MPAC 2008), a Workshop of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 9th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2008) taking place December 1-5, 2008 in Leuven, Belgium.

You can find the call for papers here.

The deadline for paper submission is August 1st.

DAIS 2008

DAIS 2008 LNCS Volume LNCS volume 5053 including the proceedings of the 8th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Application and Interoperable Systems (DAIS 2008) has now been published by Springer.

DAIS 2008 was part of the 3rd Federated Event on Distributed Computing Techniques (DisCoTec) that took place in Oslo between 4 and 6 of June 2008 and was organised by the University of Oslo.

Sotirios Terzis was the Program Committee co-chair of DAIS 2008.

TAIC PART in August

Marc Roper is general chair of the engagingly-titled TAIC PART conference. TAIC PART stands for Testing: Academic and Industrial Conference – Practice and Reearch Techniques and aims to encourage close collaboration between academics and industrialists working on the the problems of software testing. The conference is held in Cumberland Lodge in Windsor and has the atmosphere of a retreat, typically making for a very productive workshop. For more details of the event see http://www2008.taicpart.org/

TESTBENCH Workshop in Lillehammer

Marc Roper organised the first TestBench workshop at the ICST conference in Lillehammer this April. The aim of the workshop is to develop a set of benchmarking systems and tools for the empirical evaluation of software testing strategies. Further details of the workshop can be found at http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/~marc/TESTBENCH08/

Research Matters, Issue 03, 2008

Inah’s work has been mentioned in the current issue of Research Matters, available in full here.

New Model Supports Global Software Engineering

Researchers in Strathclyde’s Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) have developed an innovative new model to improve communication between software engineers working collaboratively from across the globe.

As with many other modern industries, software engineering is a global enterprise, but that globalisation introduces a challenge – how can developers ensure that they have up-to-date and shared understanding when working on a joint project across time zones?

Researchers in CIS have developed a new model based on monitoring the core interactions that take place during software development, such as the creation, deletion, updating and viewing of software project artefacts. These interactions are captured automatically, and the model then provides real-time relevance cues about the tasks, engineers and artefacts within the global shared collaboration space.

The team has already evaluated the model with a project class of advanced students, the results of which highlighted its feasibility and effectiveness. The group is now testing the model on a global engineering project spanning Russia, Finland and Ireland. Researchers are also keen to trial the model on projects associated with the University.

Department of Computer and Information Sciences

Summer Students

Congratulations to Marc and Stuart for being awarded the Carnegie Scholarship, and to Mark, Finbarr and Sebastian for receiving funding from EPSRC.  It’ll be a busy and productive summer.