Proposal
Research in software engineering takes place in many different parts of the
Division of Informatics -- almost every Institute has members who work in
software engineering. This is an important strength: we have the potential
to bring a wide range of relevant expertise to bear on software engineering
problems.
In order to capitalise and build on what we have, we propose a Programme in
Software Engineering.
The aims of the software engineering programme are
- To provide a focus for research in software engineering at Edinburgh: for
example,
- to facilitate links between research taking place in different
Institutes and using different methodologies
- to be a banner under which events of interest can take place
- to share our links with other organisations, academic and
industrial
- To raise the profile of software engineering at Edinburgh (either precedence)
- To be active in software engineering education at all levels
- To be an "advice place" for other activities of the Division that need
input from software engineers, such as tool building.
Activities
The software engineering research that we know of in the Division addresses
questions such as:
- How can the software development process best be managed? For example,
how can formal techniques be used effectively?
- How can systems best be structured? How can we use the structure of
systems to reason about them? How does the structure change over time?
- What is the relationship between semantics and pragmatics? For
example, how does design change really happen? What changes, and how?
- How do systems embed in a social and organizational context? How do we
determine requirements? How can we predict the impact of changes?
People at Edinburgh use a wide range of methodologies and techniques to
address these questions: these include applications of AI techniques, of
mathematics, of cognitive science, and empirical studies.
We have many industrial links, for example with
BT,
HSE,
IBM,
Imperial Cancer Research Fund,
LUCAS Aerospace,
Philips,
Rover,
Scottish Widows,
and others.
Building and maintaining such links with organisations that do software
engineering is an essential part of our activities. One way in which this
can be done is to organise short courses for practitioners on topics
in which we have expertise: naturally this has other benefits such as being
a source of funding (for mini workshops for example) and synergy with our
university teaching.
Events
We would like to organise occasional workshops and miniworkshops around
themes of interest. These might or might not be built around a visit by a
researcher from elsewhere, and might be public events organised by us for
the wider community, or might be internal Edinburgh events.
We also propose to hold a regular meeting which will normally be a "reading
meeting". This means that someone recommends a paper for people to read,
and that we then get together to discuss it and matters arising from it.
This seems like a useful way to build links between the different areas we
study. The meeting can also host conventional seminars.
Funding and organisation
The Programme is intended to be a featherweight organisation. We see no
benefit in having a formal concept of membership.
As mentioned above, we intend to cover the costs of the Programme's events
by ad hoc funding such as visiting fellowships. The Programme has no
general need of a budget as such.
