Software Engineering and Soft Computing

The Software Engineering und Soft Computing (SESC) Team

As software is the dynamic glue that causes computers to act on data and to produce tangible results, software engineering issues transcend any information processing system. But software is an artefact without physical substance. This constitutes special challenges for software engineering.

Students have to recognize that software engineering is more than programming. It deals with the conception, development, and evolution of complex information systems. As such, it deals as much with peoples-issues as with linguistic, and with design and programming issues. It deals with the artefacts produced as well as with the process for producing and maintaining them.

In the wealth of topics pertaining to software engineering, we focus particularly on software product and process quality. In our teaching, we strive to address the breath of the topic. In our research, we focus on specification issues, reverse engineering, and testing.

Though spreadsheet-systems are tools abundantly used in commerce and industry, spreadsheet quality is a desideratum of software quality. Focussing also on spreadsheet quality, we are members of an internationally active minority with research of high leverage potential (c.f. EUSPRIG and EUSPRIG`04).

With the AMEISE project, we are engaged in a cooperative venture with other software engineering groups to improve software engineering education.

Our soft-computing experience stems from using fuzzy, natural language information retrieval in the context of retrieval of reusable software components. The techniques have been used and are still further extended to XML-retrieval as well as to basic techniques dealing with incomplete and/or evolving data in the context of clustering and classification. In exploring the application of soft-computing techniques to software engineering topics, the researchers of both domains find the basis of their interactions.