Dr. Hakan Erdogmus visits SoftLab for a series of seminars

We thank Dr. Hakan Erdogmus (National Research Council Canada, IEEE Software Editor in Chief and Affiliate Member of Softlab), who paid a visit to Softlab btw Oct 15th-19th to give a series of seminars and to discuss research colloborations. In these seminars: researchers in Softlab, Cmpe grad students, people from Turkish software industry and Cmpe undergrad students had the opportunity of having face-to-face discussions with him. Dr. Erdogmus gave 3 different talks titled: "How software process creates value", "Emerging essentials of software development" and "An overview of test-driven development". You may reach the presentations of these talks from the links below. Pictures will be addded soon...

How software process creates value
Emerging essentials of software development
An overview of test-driven development

Prof. Aybuke Aurum visits SoftLab

Prof. Aybuke Aurum (UNSW Information Systems, Technology and Management and Affiliate Member of Softlab) visited Softlab in order to kick-off colloborative research with Softlab members. Prof. Aurum gave a seminar to Softlab members on her current research topics. Pictures are available in the gallery.

The statistics show that 7 out of every 10 major high risk development programs are encountering software problems and the rate is increasing. After surveying 8,000 IT projects, Standish group reported about 30% of all projects were cancelled. Most of the time we fail understanding the root cause of the problem. Contrary to what we believe, development costs are only the tip of the iceberg. In successful projects we spend 50% on testing, 30% on planning and 20% on coding.

On the other hand, we must understand that software will continually change. As it is changed software will become increasingly unstructured. Software engineering is hard, merely because the product is flexible, intangible, complex and the product does not have historical information. The major challenge in software development is the fight for defects. Defect is defined as “either the cause of failure or the failure itself”. In project management terms failure constitutes failing product deadlines, failing product budget (cost), and failing product quality.

Services are becoming a major metaphor for building flexible, autonomous systems on the Web. The broad vision is to enable software on the Web to act as service providers to each other, conversing about their services, negotiating them when necessary, and dynamically carrying out business together. Current Web Services are first steps towards developing such systems. Put broadly, Web services are software that interact with standard languages over the Web and provide well-defined functionality to its users. However, better techniques for describing, discovering, managing, or engaging Web services is necessary to realize the vision of services.

In our Web Services Research Group, we are primarily interested in Web services discovery, description, and composition. We study existing techniques for these aspects of Web services as well as develop new methods that are inspired from related fields, such as multiagent systems.