BSEL - Brunel Software Engineering Lab

We are recruiting two new funded PhD Students.

Project One

Securing Microservices with Just-In-Time Model Verification – Dr Nour Ali & Dr Rumyana Neykova – Project details here

Project Two

The REWIND Project (Does REfactoring Software Work? An INDustrial and Open-source Approach) – Professor Steve Counsell & Dr Mahir Arzoky – Project details here

Application Guidelines Please click here to download.

Application Deadline 29/05/2020

IDA meeting held at WLFB 207/208 (2nd floor of Wilfred Brown) at 3:00PM

Talks from:

Leila Yousefi: The Prevalence of Errors in Machine Learning Experiments (slides can be found here)

Marco Ortu: The Butterfly “Affect”: Impact of Development Practices on Cryptocurrency Prices (slides can be found here)

Gabriel Scali: Constraint Satisfaction Problems and Constraint Programming (slides can be found here)

The BSEL seminar was held at WLFB BSEL Lab (3rd floor of Wilfred Brown) at 3:00PM.

A talk from Dr Lucas Gren titled ‘Research on affect in SE (new angles from social psychology research’.

There has been an increase in the interest of human factors in SE in recent years. Most new research fields that start to look at psychological aspects, start with individual psychology since people are different and that makes intuitive sense to everyone. While these are important aspects, the social psychology research field also highlights the importance of a profound understanding of the complex interplay between social context and affect, since affect influence cannot be explained in isolation. In this talk, I would like to introduce under which judgemental circumstances people are affected by affect and suggest how to add social context to studies on affect. I also reflect on why the individual focus in human factors of SE is so rigid and attribute much of it to an over-belief in the benefits of digitalization (e.g. biometrics). Another part of the problem, the way I see it, is that these new digital solutions aim at maximizing happy feelings while social psychology studies suggest that is not how to maximize effectiveness or long-term high motivation in employees.

Faisal is supervised by Dr Mahir Arzoky (primary) and Dr Stephen Swift (secondary).

Ashley is supervised by Dr Stephen Swift (primary) and Dr Mahir Arzoky (secondary).

The BSEL seminar was held at WLFB 207/208 (2nd floor of Wilfred Brown) at 2:00PM.

A talk from Dr Nour Ali titled ‘Software architecture to Everything’ (slides can be found here).

Software architecture is the structure or structures of a software system. A software architecture of a system is, usually, represented by a model that graphically shows software elements and their interactions. Explicit software architectural models are used as critical knowledge to ensure the quality, understanding and evolution of systems.
In this talk, I will motivate you to use software architecture as a tool to manage software. I will demonstrate how we can combine software architecture with formal methods, static/dynamic analysis, optimization techniques and others. I will first start by showing the importance of an architectural model during the evolution and maintenance of a legacy system. I will then focus on architectural models of adaptable, distributed and mobile systems. I will also give you an overview of the latest projects I am working on such as the recovery of microservice architectures, the support of smart mobile and Internet of Things applications and the self-adaption to resource constraint environments.

The BSEL seminar was held at WLFB 207/208 (2nd floor of Wilfred Brown) at 2:00PM.

A talk from Dr Andrea Capiluppi titled ‘The Relevance of Application Domains in Empirical Findings’ (slides can be found here).

Research on empirical software engineering has increasingly used data from online repositories or collective efforts. The latest trends for researchers is to gather as much data as possible to (i) prevent bias in the representation of a small sample, (ii) work with a sample as close as the population itself, and (iii) showcase the performance of existing or new tools in treating vast amount of data. The effects of harvesting enormous amounts of data have been only marginally considered so far: data could be corrupted; repositories could be forked; and developer identities could be duplicated. In this paper we posit that there is a fundamental flaw in harvesting large amounts of data, and when generalising the conclusions: the application domain, or context, of the analysed systems must be the primary factor for the cluster sampling of FOSS projects. In this talk we analyse a sample of software systems, and using an existing approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we derive their application domains. We extract a suite structural OO metrics from each project, and cluster projects by domains: we show that most of the chosen metrics come from different populations, and are based on the application domains.

The BSEL seminar was held at WLFB 207/208 (2nd floor of Wilfred Brown) at 2:00PM.

A talk from Dr Rumyana Neykova titled ‘A Brief History of Types’.

Types are one of computing’s most successful concepts, they exist from the oldest to the newest programming languages. Types act as the fundamental unit of compositionality, and play important role in all aspects of software, from design to optimisation. Unfortunately, types are probably the last thing that comes to your mind when you think about distributed systems. In this talk, I will change this misconception. I will (hopefully) convince you that types can be used to understand, test, specify and verify distributed systems. In particular, I will give you a crash course on session types, which were born as types for distributed processes. We will discuss the history of session type, the fundamental meaning of communication, and how to develop distributed systems that we can trust.