Projects
Current Projects
SemImpact: Semantic Change Impact Analysis for Microservice-Based Systems
Project Leadership
Project Staff
Duration
01.09.2023 - 31.08.2027
Funding
Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
Over the last two decades, microservices have emerged as a new architectural style for the development of software applications consisting of a number of loosely coupled and reusable software components. Microservices are used, for example, in online shop applications, where each microservice provides a specific functionality. For example, one microservice provides the functionality for a shopping cart, while another microservice provides the functionality for payment. This is in contrast to monolithic software applications where all services would be implemented in a single component. The biggest advantages of microservices are that they can be developed, tested, deployed and reused independently. Although microservices are highly independent, there is a degree of coupling between them. This also means that changes to one microservice can cause unexpected side effects in other microservices. Consequently, the affected microservices may no longer function as expected, which can be very unsatisfactory for the users of the microservice. Therefore, software developers take various quality assurance measures to identify potential side effects of their changes and avoid errors. However, existing quality assurance methods and tools are imprecise and therefore potential side effects must be analyzed manually. This is not only time-consuming, but also error prone.The aim of this research project is to explore novel methods and techniques that enable software developers to accurately determine and understand the side effects of changes in a microservice. Determining possible side effects is challenging and usually not easy to calculate even for small programs, as the number of possible effects can quickly reach infinity. To overcome this challenge, we will explore different approaches to abstracting programs and interpreting the effects of individual changes. We will then experiment with different visualization techniques to help software developers understand the impact more quickly and accurately. In addition, we will investigate techniques to selectively choose test cases that use information about a change and its impact to reduce testing effort. We will implement our methods and techniques in several prototypes to evaluate them in experiments and user studies with open-source systems as well as systems and developers from our industry partners. All prototypes created in this project will be made publicly available as open source.
Coorperation Partner
- University of British Columbia, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- University of Bamberg, Information Systems and Applied Computer Sciences
Software Engineering Approaches for Evolving Systems
Project Leadership
Duration
01.01.2023 - 31.12.2026
Funding
Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH (FFG)
In this project, we will investigate methods for improving debugging and locating faults in programs using incremental, interactive formal program analysis. Our envisioned approach uses symbolic/concolic execution to obtain a first semantic of a function in a program. This will be shown to the developer(s) that can refine and/or extend the semantic. Next, the symbolic/concolic execution will be rerun with the refined semantic. This will be repeated, until the developer locates the fault and is able to understand it. The two main research challenges are: 1) find methods for refining and extending semantics as obtained with symbolic/concolic execution; 2) find methods to represent the semantics to developers so that he/she can understand and work with it.
Coorperation Partner
Responsible Safe and Secure Robotic Systems Engineering (SEEROSE)
Project Leadership
Project Staff
Duration
01.01.2021 - 31.12.2024
SEEROSE features four Ph.D. projects: The goal of the Ph.D. project DevSafe is to provide techniques and tools to support developers to responsibly develop and evolve safe and secure robotic systems. The goal of the Ph.D. project INBASE-GET is to provide mechanisms for incentivizing developers and robot collaborators to use and follow security precautions out of their own interests. The goal of the Ph.D. project SCoRE is to provide an instrument for the psychological assessment of the core qualifications relevant to robotics engineers. And finally, the goal of the Ph.D. project CERSE is to provide a guideline for the implementation of a process-ethical procedure for distributed assumption of responsibility in safe and secure robotic systems engineering.
Coorperation Partner
- AI for Robotics Lab (AIR-Lab), Tilburg University
Finished Projects
Change Analyses in Microservice-Based Systems
Project Leadership
Project Staff
Duration
01.10.2020 - 31.03.2023
Funding
Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH (FFG)
Ziel des Projekts ist die Entwicklung eines Tools zur Extraktion und Klassifikation von Aenderungen in der Implementierung von Microservices, insbesondere Microservices, die mit node.js und Angular implementiert worden sind. Im ersten Schritt wird ein Parser entwickelt, der Typescript Code parsen kann. Im nächsten Schritt werden wir unseren IJM Ansatz erweitern, um Änderungen im Source Code zu extrahieren. Im dritten Schritt werde wir Regeln implementiert, welche die extrahierten Änderungen verlinken und klassifizieren. Hierbei werden wir unsere Taxonomy für die Klassifizierung von Änderungen in Java Code angepassen bzw. erweitern. Im letzten Schritt werden wir unsere Lösungen in einer empirischen Studie mit einer Menge von Open-Source Projekten evaluieren.
Coorperation Partner
- Software Competence Center Hagenberg
SoftwareDynamics2: Fine-Grained Evolution of Software Behavior
Project Leadership
Project Staff
Duration
15.07.2016 - 21.06.2021
Funding
Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
SoftwareDynamics2: Fine-Grained Evolution of Software Behavior. In this joint-project between the University of Stuttgart and the Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt, we will investigate novel methods and techniques to analyze and visualize the impact of specific code changes on the dynamic behavior of a software system, and to find causes for specific changes of dynamic behavior in the evolution of a software system.
Coorperation Partner
University of Duisburg-Essen
Strategic Software Engineering
Project Leadership
Project Staff
Duration
01.10.2019 - 30.06.2020
Funding
Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH (FFG)
The goal of this project is to investigate an approach for versioning posts on Stack Overflow that deal with questions related to using an API. The main idea is to parse the code snippets in posts to infer the minimum and maximum API version and add this information to the posts. This information can help Stack Overflow users to filter posts and answers that might not be valid for a particular API version. Furthermore, it can help Stack Overflow to indicate outdated answers or answers that should be updated
Coorperation Partner
- Software Competence Center Hagenberg
Safe-RTSE: Safe Round-Trip Software Engineering for Improving the Maintainability of Legacy Software Systems
Project Leadership
Project Staff
Duration
01.11.2015 - 30.04.2019
Funding
Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH (FFG), XAUTOMATA TECHNOLOGY GmbH
Safe Round-Trip Software Engineering for Improving the Maintainability of Legacy Software Systems. In this project we aim at investigating methods and techniques to reverse engineer "formal models" from existing systems based on rewriting logic capturing explicit and implicit aspects of the original system. We claim that by using formal reasoning techniques on top of the extracted models the software engineer can first express a formal property that the system exhibits before re-engineering, and later check it against the re-engineered models representing the system design.
Coorperation Partner
XAUTOMATA TECHNOLOGY GmbH and Università Politecnica delle Marche
Value-Network Süd – IT enabled Eco Systems
Project Leadership
Project Staff
Duration
01.01.2017 - 31.03.2020
Funding
Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH (FFG)
The qualification network V-Net – IT enabled Eco Systems provides training for key personnel in South Styrian and Carinthian companies, preparing them to meet the new challenges and develop key competences that allow them to sell IT as a commodity, develop modern, web-based software and understand consumerism.
For more information see Value-Network Süd - IT enabled Eco Systems
Coorperation Partner
Technische Universität Graz, Life Long Learning; Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, UNI for LIFE GmbH
Allegio: Composable Embedded Systems for Healthcare
Project Leadership
Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Martin Pinzger
Project Staff
Martin Pinzger, Nicolas Dintzner, and Arie van Deursen
Duration
March 2011 - 2015
Funding
ICTRegie FES COMMIT
The objective of this project is to define an integrated set of methods and techniques that supports a systematic “Right by Design” component-based software design approach for complex embedded systems. This ensures that incremental changes become predictable and meet the required system qualities such as performance and safety. The Allegio project addresses the following key research questions:
- How to decompose systems into components such that the global system requirements can be derived from the properties of the components? What are appropriate coherent systems views to reasons about various system qualities such as evolvability, performance and safety?
- How to define interfaces of components that enable verifiable composition, re-use, configuration management, and replacement? How to include evolvability and safety aspects and how to characterize performance in a modular way?
- How to reason about correctness aspects of large complex embedded systems. How to analyze the trade-off between system qualities early in the design process?
- How do model-based verification techniques relate to model-based testing? What is the relation between the models that are suitable for these techniques? Does the verification reduce the testing effort? Can the testing results improve the scalability of the model checking techniques?
Coorperation Partner
SERG/TU Delft, Embedded Systems Institute (ESI), Philips Healthcare (iXR R&D), the University of Twente (DACS and DE), and the Eindhoven University of Technology (DAS)
ReSOS: Re-engineering Service-Oriented Systems
Project Leadership
Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Martin Pinzger
Project Staff
Martin Pinzger, Arie van Deursen, Daniele Romano, Joost Visser, Eric Bouwers, Joost Koedijk, Yaroslav Usenko, Erwin Reinhoud
Duration
November 2010 - 2014
Funding
NWO Jacquard
In recent years, companies and government organizations have installed Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service-Oriented Systems (SOS). While services are in place and run, companies face a number of problems, basically, due to continuing growth and increasing complexity of their systems. The ReSOS project tackles these problems by means of detecting and re-engineering shortcomings in the design and implementation of service-oriented systems.
In particular, we will investigate:
- Meta-models and reverse engineering techniques for service-oriented systems
- SOS specific quality attributes and metrics
- SOS anti-pattern detection strategies
- (Semi-)automated re-factoring techniques to resolve SOS anti-patterns
Coorperation Partner
TU Delft, Software Improvement Group, and KPMG CT IT
A complete list of research projects can be found at the Research Information System of the Alpen-Adria-Universität.
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