Software Engineering and Technology

The objective of the Software Engineering and Technology group is to develop methods and tools for time- and cost-efficient evolution of high-quality software systems: from inception, through development and maintenance, to phase-out.

The Software Engineering and Technology (SET) Group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) researches software engineering, with a strong focus on theory, methods and tools for maintaining consistency between models and code. SET recognizes the importance of legacy systems as well as state-of-the-art development methodologies such as model-driven software development involving formal models, domain-specific modeling and generic tooling. For this reason, investigations are not limited to recent software development phenomena, but also focus on various other topics such as software migration, re-engineering and reuse.

In SET’s vision, it is of the utmost importance to integrate the daily software development practice with cutting-edge research and high-profile education. SET welcomes collaboration with industrial and academic partners to foster a better understanding of the nature of software and software-related processes.

SET research is organized around the following themes:

• Theory, methods and tools for model-driven software engineering
  The goal is to increase product quality and reduce development costs. Both can be achieved through automated analysis of models, re-use of developed models, reduction of maintenance, and application of software generation tools. Topics addressed are: generation of code from models, reconstruction of models from code, and analysis and transformation of models and code. Domain specific languages also play an important role. 

• Software evolution and maintenance 
  This area focuses on maintenance and evolution of existing software systems as opposed to development of new ones. As a research domain, software evolution aims to obtain insights into how and why software evolves, whilst also translating those insights into techniques for assessing system evolvability and facilitating evolution. Given the fact that software evolution is an activity carried by humans, software evolution research also considers social and socio-technical challenges on top of technological challenges. In particular, we focus on social and technical aspects of diversity. The lion’s share of software evolution research is empirical in nature, i.e., it considers software engineering artifacts such as source code, questions on StackOverflow, code reviews and issue reports as data.  
  
  
• Human and social aspects of software engineering
  As software is being developed by humans, their background, the ways they communicate and collaborate influences how software is being developed (the software process) as well as the software itself (the software product). As a research domain, studies of human and social aspects of software engineering cover a broad range of topics related to psychological, emotional, cognitive, and human-centric aspects of software development, whether at the levels of individual, pair, group, team, organization, or community.  In particular, we focus on social, socio-technical and technical aspects of communication and collaboration in software teams. The lion’s share of our research is empirical in nature, i.e., it is based on observing behavior of software developers or artefacts they create, and analysing the observations by quantitative and qualitative methods.