Software Development Laboratory

Research Topics

• Software Maintenance
• Source-Code Analysis
• Reverse Engineering
• Program Understanding
• Software Visualization
• Software Traceability
• Software Reuse
• Development Environments

Research Statement

The research program focuses on the construction of methods, tools, and environments that assist in the process of software development and engineering. Topics of investigation include program understanding, software component clustering, identification of reusable components, and software visualization. Information retrieval methods are being utilized to extract semantic information from source code and associated documentation. Cognitive models of the software development process are being investigated to examine the relationship between program design methodologies in software engineering and cognitive problem solving paradigms. Software metrics and how they relate to the software comprehension process are being studied. Virtual reality environments are being investigated for the visualization of large-scale software systems.