Process Support Systems and Collaborative Environments
In the last decade, a lot of research effort has been devoted to the development of methodologies and technologies supporting coordination and collaboration of distributed teams. Examples are Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and groupware, workflow management, and document management technologies.
Traceability Management
Software artefact traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of an artefact (requirements, code, tests, models, reports, plans, etc.) developed during the software lifecycle in both a forwards and backwards direction (i.e., from its origins, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through all periods of on-going refinement and iteration in any of these phases). The two main research topics related to the traceability management are event-based systems for traceability management and information retrieval based methods and tools supporting the software engineer in the traceability link recovery.
Visual Software Development Environments
Many activities regarding software development are today accomplished by software tools that support developers in their job. A software development environment is an integrated collection of tools that aid these activities. The widespread use of visual systems has in particular motivated the need for tools that aid in the design and implementation of visual interfaces and environments. The members of the SE@SA lab are mainly involved in the definition of methods and tools for the specification and automatic generation of visual development environments for different applications, such as software development and maintenance, access policy definition and configuration, e-learning, and virtual reality.