Working group Software Engineering
Welcome to the working group Software Engineering
Our working group does research in the areas of program analysis, software quality, information security and software visualization.
Teaching
A special focus of our teaching is in the area of software maintenance and evolution. Software maintenance is often neglected in teaching at universities. It is usually mentioned as the last phase of the software life cycle, but rarely discussed in detail. This is in contrast to the importance of maintenance in practice. Between 50% and 80% of the costs of software development arise in maintenance. For students, these figures can be interpreted as meaning that they will not usually build systems on a greenfield site, but rather spend most of their professional entity maintaining existing systems. We want to prepare them sufficiently for this in their education. We want to demonstrate that software maintenance is not only important and demanding, but also fun.
Research project Bauhaus
Software maintenance is not only important to us in teaching. We are also - known as the Bauhaus - one of the most active groups in research on this topic. The research project Bauhaus was founded in 1997 as a cooperation project between the Chair of Programming Languages and Compiler Construction at the University of Stuttgart and the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering. The goal of the Bauhaus project is the development of description tools, analysis methods and related tools that makes it easier for maintenance engineers to semi-automatically derive various views of the architecture of legacy systems, identify reusable components and estimate the effects of program changes. The project is internationally renowned for its contributions to architectural reconstruction, feature localization, protocol derivation, clone recognition, and software clustering (a complete list of publications can be found in the Bauhaus Library) and was honored at the DoIT Award 2003 for outstanding scientific achievements. Works of the Bauhaus Group have been awarded several times with "Best Paper" awards. Our main research interests are the consolidation of existing software variants into a software product line and clone recognition.