Systems and Software Engineering concerns processes, tools, techniques, and theories for constructing computer-based systems with guaranteed qualities of functionality, reliability, availability, security, real-time responsiveness, adaptability, safety, and maintainability. The University of Queensland's research in this field is centred on three principal areas:
- improvement of systems and software engineering processes;
- rigorous (mathematical) approaches to design and construction of computer-based systems; and
- practical tools to assist engineers in these endeavours.
Current trends in the development of complex computer-based systems are based on high-level platform-independent models of system behaviour. New research challenges include the verification and validation of model-based systems, and the formalisation of software specification and design patterns. With the increasing complexity of software used to implement safety-critical real-time systems, rigorous approaches to the provision of fault-tolerance in such systems are a growing challenge.
The University of Queensland's Systems and Software Engineering research division is:
- conducting research into demonstrable tools and techniques that enable software and systems engineers to develop and evolve better software-intensive systems, more efficiently and more effectively (see current projects);
- collaborating with industry to transfer its research outcomes and to inform its research direction;
- engaging industry and other researchers in the group's major research themes, and
- educating students and industry practitioners in the state-of-the-art of systems and software engineering; and
- nurturing individual researchers working in the field of systems and software engineering.