The software engineering department of Simula Research Laboratory is organising two day courses on different software engineering topics.
Today, the first half-day was on software architectural design using model-based approaches tutored by Bran Selic. Bran’s course was about documenting software architecture in the form of models and their advantages. He recommends teaching abstraction in the undergraduate level and use of architectural patterns in development of modern distributed software systems. He points out that one of the major research challenges is to transform software architecture design into a mature engineering discipline.
The second half-day was on advanced topics in software testing. Sagar Sen started off with a brief talk on “Glimpses of history in software testing”. Here he presented ideas that were developed several decades ago such as assertions (1949), model-based testing (1979), interaction testing (1996) that are still not fully adopted by the software industry to help improve the quality of software. In a consequent talk he presented ideas in combinatorial interaction testing and its application to 3 real cases studies: web service orchestrations, testing data-intensive systems, and testing a self-adaptive vision system. He also discussed automatic test case generation by combining interaction testing and model checking. The second speaker of the day was Shaukat Ali who spoke about search-based software engineering. He demonstrated its use to address problems in requirements allocation and testing highly-configurable systems. Shaukat talked about representing a software engineering problem as a search problem (with a fitness function) that can be solved using multi-objective optimisation techniques such as genetic algorithms and other evolutionary algorithms
We have had around 40 participants from different software companies in Norway including Konsberg Maritime, Norwegian Directorate of Customs and Excise Department, ABB Robotics, FMC Technologies, Cisco Systems, Kreftregistret, Mesan, Datarepons, Esito, Zellerin, Systemsoft.
