Research and Development

Former Members: Murat Gungor, Sergey Karamov, Arun Iyer, and Kambiz Seraji DOPL Lab - CST 4-116 The gap between theory and practice in theory
is nowhere near as big as
the gap between theory and practice in practice.

I have recently started a small research group that focuses on software complexity, accessibility and reuse. Some of this work centers around the analysis and evaluation of large software systems using grammar-based static dependency analyses (ResearchStatement.htm). We are also interested in the notion of a Software Foundry and an associated Foundry Object Model, developing tools to support understanding large systems, and using distributed and massively parallel machinery to solve challenging engineering and scientific problems. The research group currently consists of four Doctoral students, several students preparing Master's Theses under my direction, and a number of students doing Independent Studies.

In the photos above, Kanat Bolazar is working on ideas and tools to investigate the behavior of large existing software systems, Phil Pratt-Szeliga is interested in distributed and parallel means to attack challenging computational problems, Mehmet Kaya is currently preparing for his qualifying examinations, and then expects to work on restructuring software, and Grace Xue is working on software development process models.

Only students, known to me through work in one of my courses, are accepted into this group. Because of my teaching load I do not seek outside funding, although we occasionally work on funded projects that happen to come our way. I fund Doctoral and Master's Thesis students by making them Teaching Assistants in my courses. For the reasons, cited above, I do not reply to external requests for funded research under my direction.

We are building the infrastructure to re-engineer software reuse processes. Our goals are to make accessible, for reuse, not only code, but also documentation and test products, from a globally accessible place. This place could be a project server on a local area network or a corporate software resource server, accessible over the internet as a web service.

A major concern of ours is to honor the connectedness of software. That is, we provide accessiblity to code, its documentation, and test drivers, for any component, including any lower level components on which it may depend. The implications are that code, documentation, and test are distributed across a network of components and are reusable at any level of the distribution graph.

Some of this research extends into the classroom. Recently (Fall '02), for example, the CSE784.xml class developed a Foundry.xml that implements some of the software accessibility ideas we are exploring.

Research for a MastersTheses.xml is smaller in scope and requires fewer original contributions than a Doctoral Dissertation. However it is a significant piece of work, requiring perhaps six months of half time work. Here are some current thesis activities carried out by my students: SoftwareRestructuring.xml, Santosh Singh Kesar : Automatic extraction of functions from large weakly structured code. Driven by rule-based static analysis. Completed October 8, 2008. SWMatrixModelDrivenDev.xml, Tilak Patel : Model-Driven development generates code from UML style models. This becomes much more than a code generation wizard when there is a strong concept of components, the Software Matrix, used as an integral part of this process. Completed December 21, 2007. SWMatrixCrossPlatformDev.xml, Vijay Appadurai : Cross-Platform Development targets flexible implementation on more than one platform. Vijay used Linux and Windows platforms for his demonstration. Completed March 23, 2007. SelfHealingSoftwareMatrix.xml, Anirudha Krishna : a self-healing framework using the Software Matrix structure. It is effective and remarkably simple. Completed December 9, 2005. AspectOrientedProgramming.xml, Ramaswamy Krishnan-Chittur : explores several interesting applications supported by .Net interception. Completed April 19, 2005. SoftwareMatrix.xml, Riddhiman Ghosh : an experiment using message-passing and broad use of the observer pattern to make software salvage a useful paradigm. By salvage, we mean the lifting of a significant block of one system to be used within another without terminal arterial bleeding. Completed December 15, 2004. C++ Beans, An Experiment in Simplification, Siddhartha Azad, completed October 2002 Dynamic Internet Communities : A Comparison between Grid and Peer-to-Peer Computing, Shawn Dahlen [converted to an independent study - September 2003]. Performance Comparison of .Net and J2EE for some typical remoting and web service applications, Srinivas Shilagani [converted to an independent study - May 2004].

Occasionally we have worked on funded projects for local companies, usually under the www.case.syr.edu umbrella.