The Software Engineering Research Group focuses on research that is impactful in relation to its scientific contribution, and relevant to industry. Most of what we do is carried out in collaboration with industrial partners. Furthermore, we also strive for research that is inter-disciplinary (e.g. psychology & software engineering, sustainability & software engineering; artificial intelligence & software engineering).
As shown in the Figure above, the research this group carries out is always grounded on three foundations – Quantitative and/or Qualitative research methods, Statistical and/or Machine Learning Techniques, and/or Foundation Models and/or Knowledge elicitation, and Evidence-based Research. Six sub-areas (all in blue in the above Figure) have already been the focus of numerous industrial collaborations and peer reviewed research papers at conferences and journals. The two orange sub-areas correspond to newly initiated research (immersive realities etc) and soon to be initiated research (sustainability).
Within the context of this research group, the research being carried out aims to be impactful in relation to its scientific contribution, and relevant to industry. Most of what we do is carried out in collaboration with industrial partners. We also strive for research that is inter-disciplinary (e.g. psychology & software engineering, sustainability & software engineering; artificial intelligence & software engineering).
The lead of the software engineering research group is Professor Emilia Mendes, who is amongst the top 2% scientists in the world based on career citations (2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 datasets (https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/6)
The research sub-areas that have made the strongest research contributions to date have been respectively Web/Software effort estimation, Human-centric Software Engineering, Value-based Software Engineering, and EBSE Methodological aspects. The first three sub-areas have been carried out in collaboration with numerous industrial partners in countries such as New Zealand, Brazil, Sweden, and Finland. They have also led to numerous fully refereed research papers at prestigious journals and conferences in Software Engineering such as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Information and Software Technology, Journal of Systems and Software and the International Conference on Software Engineering. Most of the research carried out has been led by Professor Mendes.
“Software engineering may be defined as the systematic design and development of software products and the management of the software process. Software engineering has as one of its primary objectives the production of programs that meet specifications, and are demonstrably accurate, produced on time, and within budget.”
H. D. Mills, "The management of software engineering, Part I: Principles of software engineering," in IBM Systems Journal, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 414-420, 1980, doi: 10.1147/sj.194.0414.
