Effective software process improvement in a large-scale defence contracting environment. Most organisations struggle to consistently develop high-quality software on schedule and within budget. Continuing changes in technologies and customer expectations complicate this challenge. Software process improvement frameworks aim to guide organisations towards best practice. This project will assess practical experience with individual software process improvement frameworks in a large-scale defence c ....Effective software process improvement in a large-scale defence contracting environment. Most organisations struggle to consistently develop high-quality software on schedule and within budget. Continuing changes in technologies and customer expectations complicate this challenge. Software process improvement frameworks aim to guide organisations towards best practice. This project will assess practical experience with individual software process improvement frameworks in a large-scale defence contracting environment, with the goal of developing an effective strategy for integrating them. The outcomes will include documented experience with specific process improvement frameworks and a strategy for an overall framework that combines them.Read moreRead less
Reducing the risks associated with developing large-scale, critical software-integrated systems. Industry, government and defence increasingly rely on large-scale, critical software-integrated systems. The scale and complexity of these systems means current methods of analysing, designing and assuring their dependability are struggling to provide the constructive support and assurance that is demanded. Consequently, there are significant risks of cost and schedule overruns and of system problems ....Reducing the risks associated with developing large-scale, critical software-integrated systems. Industry, government and defence increasingly rely on large-scale, critical software-integrated systems. The scale and complexity of these systems means current methods of analysing, designing and assuring their dependability are struggling to provide the constructive support and assurance that is demanded. Consequently, there are significant risks of cost and schedule overruns and of system problems and failures. This project builds on results from our current collaboration - a new method for modelling, analysis and defect detection for the requirements of large-scale systems. We will develop and scale-up to industry strength, simpler, more powerful, strategies for analysing, designing and providing the high level of assurance required.Read moreRead less
Achieving Tailored Industrial Software Process Improvement with Experience Repositories and Electronic Process Guides. There is a well-recognised need for organisations to improve their software development processes in order to achieve higher software quality and greater efficiencies in development. The use of electronic process guides and experience repositories have been two technologies independently proposed to achieve these aims. This research will develop a framework, methods and tools ....Achieving Tailored Industrial Software Process Improvement with Experience Repositories and Electronic Process Guides. There is a well-recognised need for organisations to improve their software development processes in order to achieve higher software quality and greater efficiencies in development. The use of electronic process guides and experience repositories have been two technologies independently proposed to achieve these aims. This research will develop a framework, methods and tools to allow integration of experience repositories and electronic process guides to facilitate process tailoring, process improvement, and project management. The result will be significant improvements in software development productivity and quality.Read moreRead less
Eat and Dream: effective automatic testing and debugging for real-life embedded wireless communications software. Embedded software is a key enabling technology for the majority of Australian manufacturing industries, including strategically important sectors such as the automotive industry. Embedded wireless communication technologies are playing an increasingly significant role in Australia with a wide range of critical applications ranging from natural disaster early warning to personal healt ....Eat and Dream: effective automatic testing and debugging for real-life embedded wireless communications software. Embedded software is a key enabling technology for the majority of Australian manufacturing industries, including strategically important sectors such as the automotive industry. Embedded wireless communication technologies are playing an increasingly significant role in Australia with a wide range of critical applications ranging from natural disaster early warning to personal health monitoring. Embedded wireless communications software, however, is difficult to test and debug owing to the complexity of the operational environment and complications arising from the interplay between software and hardware. This project will develop an effective and automatic technology to alleviate these difficulties and achieve higher quality software.Read moreRead less
A Generic Software Architecture for Web-Based Applications on Micro-Mobile Systems. The next generation of computers that will capture the imagination of the society are likely to be micro-mobile devices such as personal digital assistants, mobile phones, smartcards and chips embedded in home and office items. Developing applications for information processing using a wireless network of such devices is an emerging challenge. This project will develop and evaluate a generic architecture for web- ....A Generic Software Architecture for Web-Based Applications on Micro-Mobile Systems. The next generation of computers that will capture the imagination of the society are likely to be micro-mobile devices such as personal digital assistants, mobile phones, smartcards and chips embedded in home and office items. Developing applications for information processing using a wireless network of such devices is an emerging challenge. This project will develop and evaluate a generic architecture for web-based applications on micro-mobile devices. This will make it easy to design applications that can seamlessly interact with different kinds of devices. The project will be carried out in partnership with Total Internet Centre, a Newcastle based regional enterprise.Read moreRead less
Effective software vulnerability detection for web services. This project aims to design and implement new and better methods to find vulnerabilities in software services delivered over the web or through the cloud, as well as methods for proving the absence of certain types of vulnerability. So-called injection attacks are pervasive and generally considered the most important security threat on today's Internet. The programming languages used for software services tend to use strings as a unive ....Effective software vulnerability detection for web services. This project aims to design and implement new and better methods to find vulnerabilities in software services delivered over the web or through the cloud, as well as methods for proving the absence of certain types of vulnerability. So-called injection attacks are pervasive and generally considered the most important security threat on today's Internet. The programming languages used for software services tend to use strings as a universal data structure, which unfortunately makes it hard to separate trusted code from untrusted user-provided data. This project intends to develop novel program analysis tools and string constraint solvers, and employ these tools to support sophisticated automated reasoning about string manipulating software.Read moreRead less
Investigation of a Dynamic Collaborative Framework for Multi-Modal Devices. Modern business and society increasingly call for agility through the rapid formation of groups and collaboration of individuals. Mobile computing devices have the potential to enable this collaboration. However this is currently unrealised; software is not keeping up with hardware. This project aims to investigate techniques and software tools to provide an adaptive framework for multimedia-rich applications, which seam ....Investigation of a Dynamic Collaborative Framework for Multi-Modal Devices. Modern business and society increasingly call for agility through the rapid formation of groups and collaboration of individuals. Mobile computing devices have the potential to enable this collaboration. However this is currently unrealised; software is not keeping up with hardware. This project aims to investigate techniques and software tools to provide an adaptive framework for multimedia-rich applications, which seamlessly support collaboration through multi-modal communications between heterogenous mobile devices. This combination of multimedia, smart devices and advanced communications has the potential to revolutionise many key industries by making information available and manipulable in new and better ways.Read moreRead less
Formal modelling and analysis of software requirements for air traffic management systems for improved integrity assurance. This project will significantly reduce the time and cost of developing software for critical applications such as aviation and air traffic management. As well as improving the trustworthiness of safety-critical computer-based systems, this project will also enable system improvements to be deployed faster and more reliably.
Ontology Based Multisite Distributed Software Development. Increasingly clients in cities are developing software overseas or in regional centres. The participating companies have found existing centralized software engineering techniques inadequate for multisite development. This project produces new principles and techniques for multisite distributed software development. Thus it proposes a new methodology, a new project management approach, a new workflow tracking technique and a new concept ....Ontology Based Multisite Distributed Software Development. Increasingly clients in cities are developing software overseas or in regional centres. The participating companies have found existing centralized software engineering techniques inadequate for multisite development. This project produces new principles and techniques for multisite distributed software development. Thus it proposes a new methodology, a new project management approach, a new workflow tracking technique and a new concept of software object/component that allows differentiated access. A platform is also developed for use in field studies for validation and benchmarking. The results will help Australia become a provider of software services for international clients and permit devolution to regional centres.Read moreRead less
GriddLeS: Building Grid Applications from Legacy Software. Grid computing is emerging as a major new capability for modern, high performance technical computing. Such Grids couple geographically distributed resources such as high performance computers, workstations, clusters, and scientific instruments. Traditional methods of producing software for Grids are inefficient and error prone, and will not allow the rapid deployment of new applications. This project concerns the development of a tool t ....GriddLeS: Building Grid Applications from Legacy Software. Grid computing is emerging as a major new capability for modern, high performance technical computing. Such Grids couple geographically distributed resources such as high performance computers, workstations, clusters, and scientific instruments. Traditional methods of producing software for Grids are inefficient and error prone, and will not allow the rapid deployment of new applications. This project concerns the development of a tool that will facilitate the construction of complex Grid application using legacy software components. It will test the new ideas with a range of scientific demonstrators, including atmospheric science, geo-science and mechanical engineering.Read moreRead less