Software Technology for Quality Improvement

The focus of our research is on the assessment and improvement of the quality of software products. Many kinds of properties are studied: functional properties (i.e. does the program have the right input-output correspondence?) and non-functional properties (e.g. memory consumption, absence of deadlock, and sustainability). This line does not have education and learning as initial, main focus. However, applications of the work for education will be actively investigated. Not only via incorporating the results in student research and in courses for students but also in Ph.D. schools and in publishing educational material and new methods for teaching the latest research results effectively. Details can be found in the Software Technology Research Plan 2010-2015.

Inter-university cooperation

We cooperate heavily with the Radboud University Nijmegen, the section Digital Security in particular. Part of our research group is located in the premises of the section Digital Security. The projects we are participating in are AHA, CHARTER, Secure Metering, GoGreen, LaQuSo, FVDAM, QUASIMODO and ELVEN. Main researchers are Marko van Eekelen, Julien Schmaltz and Harald Vranken. We currently have 3 internal OU Ph.D. students. 3 people who are external to the OU are writing their research plans in order to become external OU Ph.D. students.

Subtopics

The main subtopics we have been working on:

  • Resource consumption analysis. This mainly concerns memory and time consumption analysis of software. A result of this work is the tool ResAna.
  • Formal Verification of Networks-on-chip. This concerns the formal verification of Networks-On-Chips. The Intel corporation is funding this multi-core research with a substantial research grant.
  • Security analysis. This concerns virtualization security issues and smart grid security issues.
  • Other software analysis topics. Smaller research topics are formal verification of functional properties, analysis of sustainability, verification of software product lines, analysis of usage of software and methodical computer science education.