Possible research projects:The research agenda of the LGSSE encompasses all areas of Software Engineering. The research interests of LGSSE academics include the following:

• Ad-hoc networking
• Agile Methods
• Applied formal methods
• Artificial life
• Aspect-oriented development
• Context awareness
• Design Patterns
• Distributed systems
• (end-to-end) Electronic voting systems
• Enterprise Software
• Free and Open Source Software
• Functional systems
• Gesture recognition
• Global Software Development
• Human computer interaction
• Information visualisation
• Knowledge representation
• Location based systems
• Mathematics applied to Software Engineering
• Middleware
• Mobile Computing
• Mobile Networks
• Multi-modal interfaces
• Object-oriented and component-based systems and languages
• Performance Engineering
• Pervasive and ubiquitous computing
• Queueing Theory
• Refactoring
• Reverse engineering
• Services Oriented computing
• Software Engineering
• Software Evolution
• Software Reengineering
• Software/system/network security
• Software visualisation
• Systems modelling
• Telecommunication Systems

Further details on the above areas at the following link: Lero Research Areas

Projects

PROJECT TITLE
Towards the Automatic Generation of Web GIS - Dr Michela Bertolotto

ABSTRACT

The goal of disseminating, manipulating, and exploiting spatial knowledge over the Internet, has led to the development of Web applications, known as Web Geographic Information Systems (Web GIS). This has motivated a growing need for tools that allow to rapidly develop Web GIS. Among the different solutions available for traditional web applications, automatic generation tools deserve special attention thanks to the higher level of abstraction required during development. This facilitate the job of developers who need only provide a visual specification of the target application that is automatically constructed by the tool.
The purpose of this project is to investigate an extension of WebML (Web Modeling Language) to the GIS context. WebML is a high-level, formal visual language specifically conceived to design data-intensive Web applications.
The proposal is motivated by the observation that Web GIS can be considered as a particular class of data-intensive Web applications and by the fact that WebML is gaining an increasing success for designing and developing traditional data-intensive web applications.

Moreover, since WebML is supported by a specifically conceived CASE tool (WebRATIO), able to automatically generate the designed web applications, we will use such a tool to manage our WebML extension.

Dr Ita Richardson has three projects that she would be interested in supervising
with the Lero Graduate School. If you are interested in working on either of
these projects, feel free to include it in your application to the LGSSE. One
project relates to Software Processes within Global Software Development. Two
projects are within the EU S-Cube project.
Software Processes in Global Software Development

Project 1 (initial outline): Development of Global Software Process models for
Companies working in a regulated environment (such as Automotive, Medical Device,
Financial)
The growth of the global economy in recent years requires that many software
engineers must collaborate over geographical, temporal and/or cultural distance,
collectively termed as 'global distance'[1, 2]. In this situation, organisations still face
the regular collocated project management challenges of co-ordination, visibility,
communication and cooperation, but the development environment is more complex
[3, 4]. Global distance introduces its own barriers and complexities which negatively
impacts these project management challenges [5-8]. Research by Casey and
Richardson [9] demonstrate that there are many barriers and complexities (factors),
which can be grouped into project management, culture, communication and fear [10,
11], which come into play during the implementation of global projects. In addition,
these factors have a compounding effect on each other, further increasing the
possibility of negative impact. For example, skills management, a project
management factor, is complicated when there are language difficulties across
temporal and geographical distances. In addition, previous research into global
software development by Smite [12] has shown that, in practice, there is a wide
variety of collaboration models used where parts of the life-cycle are shared between
groups [1, 13]. For example, analysis, design and implementation may be undertaken
in one country while development and testing are undertaken in another.
Consequently, collaboration by software engineering teams across global distance
must be managed correctly to ensure successful development and implementation of
software projects [14, 15].
While carrying out industry based research, we have seen attempts to implement
accepted software process models such as Capability Maturity Model Integrated
(CMMI) [16] or ISO15504 (also known as SPICE) [17] within global software
engineering environments. However, while these models can and do operate
successfully in local environments, they do not provide for the impact of the global
factors and variety of collaboration models mentioned above. Software processes
defined within these models and which work successfully in a local environment will
not necessarily work in global environments, and modifications to existing process
models are required to take global distance into account. Furthermore, globalisation
is becoming a business model within the regulated sectors, such as the Automotive,
Medical Device and Financial Services sectors, which have to take regulatory
requirements into account.
This PhD project will focus on software process (possibly one specific process, but
maybe a combination of processes) as defined in a process model such as CMMI or
ISO15504. It will examine how both the global factors and regulatory requirements
can be incorporated in this process with a view to incorporating them within the
model. The student may have the opportunity to carry out their research in close
collaboration with the regulated sector to help understand how this can be done
successfully and may be involved in implementation and evaluation within that sector.
References
1. Carmel, E., Global Software Teams: Collaboration Across Borders and Time Zones. 1999,
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
2. Prikladnicki, R., J.L.N. Audy, and R. Evaristo, Global software development in practice
lessons learned Software Process Improvement and Practice
2003. 8(4): p. 267 - 279.
3. Nidiffer, K.E. and D. Dolan, Evolving distributed project management. IEEE Software 2005.
22(5): p. 63 - 72
4. Herbsleb, J.D. and D. Moitra, Global Software Development. IEEE Software, 2001. 18(2): p.
16 - 20.
5. Herbsleb, J.D. and A. Mockus, An Empirical Study of Speed and Communication in Globally
Distributed Software Development IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2003. 29(6): p. 481-
494
6. Paré, G. and L. Dubé. Virtual teams: an exploratory study of key challenges and strategies in
Proceeding of the 20th the International Conference on Information Systems 1999 Charlotte, North
Carolina, United States: Association for Information Systems.
7. Carmel, E. and R. Agarwal, Tactical Approaches for Alleviating Distance in Global Software
Development. IEEE Software, 2001. 1(2): p. 22 - 29.
8. Damian, D.E. and D. Zowghi. An insight into the interplay between culture, conflict and
distance in globally distributed requirements negotiations. in Proceedings of the 36th International
Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS'03). IEEE. 2002. 2003. Hawaii.
9. Casey, Valentine and Ita Richardson, Uncovering the Reality within Virtual Software Teams,
International Conference on Global Software Engineering, ICGSE06, Florianopolis, Florianopolis,
Brazil, 16-19 October 2006, IEEE Computer Society, CD Proceedings, ISBN 0-7695-2663-2.
10. Casey, V. and I. Richardson. Practical Experience of Virtual Team Software Development. in
Euro SPI 2004 European Software Process Improvement, . 2004. Trondheim, Norway.
11. Casey, V. and I. Richardson. Virtual Software Teams: Overcoming the Obstacles. in 3rd
World Congress for Software Quality. 2005. Munich, Germany.
12. Šmite, Darja, PhD Thesis, Riga Information Technology Institute, University of Latvia, 2007.
13. Herbsleb, J.D. and R.E. Grinter, Architectures, coordination, and distance: Conway's law and
beyond. IEEE Software, 1999. 16 (5): p. 63 - 70
14. Casey, V. and I. Richardson. Project Management within Virtual Software Teams. in
International Conference on Global Software Engineering, ICGSE 2006. 2006. Florianopolis, Brazil:
IEEE.
15. Karolak, D.W., Global Software Development: Managing Virtual Teams and Environments.
1999, Los Alamitos, CA, USA IEEE Computer Society Press.
16. Casey, V., The Study of the Factors and Issues which Facilitate and Obstruct the Operation of
Globally Distributed Virtual Software Testing Teams in Computer Science & Information Systems
2007, University of Limerick Ireland.
17. CMMI Product Team: Capability Maturity Model® Integration for Development, Version 1.2.
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/06.reports/06tr008.html, Technical Report CMU/SEI-
2006-TR-008, 2006.

Project 2 S-Cube project (https://www.s-cube-network.eu/)
S-Cube - Software Services and Systems is a Network of Excellence FP7 project.
There are 15 partners in the project, one of which is Lero@UL. The project is led by
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany and TilBurg University, The Netherlands.
Lero@UL is involved in 11 workpackages (strands) within S-Cube, so involvement
for PhD students will vary. Our involvement will focus mostly on workpackages
within the service composition and coordination and business process management
layers. However, as you will be working towards a PhD qualification, so we will
work together to develop a project plan for you which will allow Lero@UL to fulfil
our commitment to S-Cube, while also providing you with a PhD qualification at the
end of the project.
Project 2 (initial outline): Engineering Principles, Techniques and Methodologies for
Hybrid, Service-based Applications / Integration Framework: Baseline and Definition
(all partners involved)
We need to integrate design and discipline knowledge from the related fields that
impact the engineering of service based applications. Design knowledge expresses
how engineering occurs, as processes, methodologies, modelling and analysis
techniques. Discipline knowledge expresses theories about how service based
applications can be used in their environments, and is applied using design
knowledge.
Therefore we need to:
- Gather and coordinate design knowledge about how to engineer software and
service-oriented systems infrastructures, service compositions and management of
business processes supported by these systems;
- Codify discipline knowledge from fields outside of software and service-oriented
systems engineering, specifically considering Human Computer Interfaces and
context, to understand how to engineer service based applications for different and
potentially changing and evolving usage environments.
We will gather and coordinate design knowledge to develop new integrated models of
how to engineer service based applications. These models will be descriptive, to
enable researchers to compare and contrast processes, methods, models and analysis
techniques.
Furthermore we want to define a framework which will integrate principles,
techniques and methodologies for the engineering and adaptation of service based
applications. It will also encompass methods of the horizontal functional layers of
service based applications, namely service infrastructures, service composition and
coordination, and business process management. It will cater for the needs of various
types of users. Indeed, users may act as service composers, or as service managers to
monitor and adapt services, or as service consumers. These different user types will
exploit different categories of knowledge on the technical aspects of service based
applications and will adopt different engineering and adaptation methodologies and
processes.
This project is more suited to those students who have a software engineering /
computer science / computer systems background.

Project 3 (initial outline): Business Process Management (6 partners involved)
This project will scrutinize and develop fundamental new concepts that drive service
implementation from business models that relate to software providers and
telecommunication service providers, in a way that a service-enabled process can be
quickly altered to address enhancements or fine-tuning and cope, in general, with new
business dynamics. This overall objective is partitioned in two sub-objectives:
- Understand and classify the mechanisms required for accommodating
unanticipated changes to service-enabled processes. The new generation Business
Process Management (BPM) will deal with dynamic service behaviour and
exceptions in an automated, transactional manner. Contextual changes and
exceptions are instances in which an existing service-enabled process or
transactions cannot be handled by current process technology and eventually
systems. These can occur within a single process or among several processes
within a service network that are not aligned due to complexity of the service
network. Introduction of new complex services (e.g., bundled financial services,
instant credit approvals, etc.) and disruptions caused by upstream and downstream
process changes or either of them, the introduction of new partners is typical
examples of such complexity.
- Understand and classify the mechanisms that enable better collaboration and
decision making within integrated Agile Service Networks (ASNs). These may
include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are used to gauge the
performance of an organisational and to guide top management decisions about
business strategy, such as new product and services introduction, pricing, etc. It
may also include SLAs which govern service interactions, and especially in long
term business relationships such as the ones existing in an integrated service
network.
The novel BPM concepts that result from this workpackage result in extensions to the
S-Cube convergence knowledge model.
This project will suit a student with an Information Systems / e-Commerce / Business
Modelling background.

Towards a theory of context-aware mobile agents - Professor Matthew
Hennessy

In many distributed computing scenarios systems have to respond to
dynamically changing circumstances in their environment. This is
particularly true of mobile agents, which migrate around widely
distributed and unstable networks in search of data and resources;
such agents necessarily need to discover current locally available
entities and how to interact with them.

Most current process description languages are very static in nature,
with a predetermined world view. The object of this project is to
develop a description language suitable for specifying and
implementing context-aware mobile agents.
The starting point will be an existing process description language,
such as the picalculus, to which will be added novel features suitable
for context- ware computing.
Three topics will be of particular interest:

• What are the primitive language features necessary to describe mobile agents with resource discovery features?
• What typing systems are necessary to ensure the correct behaviour of mobile agents operating in only partially known environments?
• What is the appropriate notion of behaviour for context-aware agents? This will be a well-structured and focused project, suitable for a student with some basic knowledge of discrete mathematics. It will start with a review of current context-aware computing infrastructures
• A review of existing formalisms, such as the picalculus, for describing processes.
• In particular no prior knowledge of this material is required.