Description: The Open University is open to all adults resident in the United Kingdom. Since 1992 it has also offered its programmes of study throughout Europe. The Open University is Britain's largest single teaching institution, with more than 200,000 people studying its courses in 1998. Since its establishment by Royal Charter in 1969, it has opened the door to higher education for more than 2 million people. It is the largest teaching university in the UK, but also has a large volume of research activity which places it in the upper half of the research league table with many 5-rated areas.
The Computing Department has concentrated its research within the broad areas of Software Engineering and Software Technology, Human and Social factors, and the application of IT to the teaching of computing. The Department has close links with other parts of the university that also have research interests in Computing.
We have a strong interest in such cross-disciplinary collaborations, both within our own department, and with other departments and faculties. Software Engineering and Software Technology Our current work here is primarily informed by component and framework views of software, but with a strong interest in formal approaches. Current projects include:
- Enterprise modelling to enable change (EMTECH): this EPSRC-funded project in the Systems Engineering for Business Process Change (SEBPC) programme is concerned with modelling business systems and their IT support and how these are changed while business processes value is preserved. Objects, frameworks, and product line views of software development are being used.
- APSET - A Parallel Software Engineering Tool: internally funded, providing software engineering tools for the parallelisation of functional programs on particular parallel architectures.
- Documenting Frameworks with Architectural Styles - funded by the British Council under the Windsor Treaty, this project collaborates with the Dept. de Informatica, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal.
- Facade was funded by the EPSRC to look at concurrent engineering during concept formation and design in mechatronic (multi-technology) products
- Glossasoft - software localisation: this was funded by the EU as part of its Language Engineering action, and investigated the use of language generation methods with the meaning of messages embedded in the software, with that meaning presented in the local language at run time. An internationalisation software architecture was developed, with localisation components
- EUROWARE (reusable components traded on the Internet), was funded by the EU.
- ODISSEY, was funded by the EPSRC to investigate change management in distributed systems.
- FASGEP and CONTESSE, two projects were funded by SERC/DTI via Nuclear Electric to investigate software testing and reliability in the safety critical area. With the growing interest in Use Cases in Object Oriented methods, we hope to return to this line of research. See also: PRICES and EuropeMMM below.
We take a broad view of how computers interact with people, as can be seen in the following projects.
- Social Construction of Software (SoCS Research Group): this is internally funded, SoCS explores the social dimension of software currently from two inter-related directions: the social construction of an emergent paradigm for software development (the object-oriented approach) and the social construction of a key attribute of software development (software quality). These two directions are inter-related both in the obvious sense of articulating similar concerns about software development (e.g. quality is frequently articulated as achievable in terms of a software development paradigm) but also in the sense that they are both sustained by a culture that permanently anticipates intense technological advances and solutions.
- Cross cultural Software: this project is EPSRC funded - looking at the gap between the western culture embedded in software and computers and other cultures using Nepal as a case study. The surface problems are thos of langauge and writing systems, representations of time measurements, but deeper cultural values.
- Computers and music: by taking novel representations of musical scores, the teaching of music can be supported through the computer.
- PRICES: this was funded by the SERC and DTI to look at human factors in the software development process, in the context of the development of safety critical systems.
Central to this is the Centre for Informatics Education (CIER) with a full time Research Fellow to lead it. This Centre forms the focus for our research interests in the learning and teaching of computing. Projects in this area are:
- EPCOS: this is funded by the HEFC to look into group projects in computing, with CIER providing the expertise in experimental design and evaluation. Remote Group Working in Computing courses: an OU funded investigation into the pedagogic support mechanisms required for remote group working within the OU computing programme.
- AESOP: An Electronic Student Observatory Project: This project is internally funded to build a collection of software tools for observing and analysing how students go about their practical work in Computing. The aim is to produce software that can be used in two modes: as a tool to support teaching and as a tool to support research on how students learn.
- EuropeMMM: this EU funded project is looking at custom publishing of educational multimedia, taking a component view of this, with a focus on educational usability and intellectual property rights.
This is an area whose aim is to increase the number of women studying computing by an approach to computing which develops and maintains the interest of women in the subject. Research focuses attention on the content and style of our courses, the language used and the images projected - some members of our department are also members of the University's Women Into Science and Engineering (WISE) research group.
Researchers associated with the project: Steve Armstrong, Leonor Barroca, Lynne Dunckley, Jon Hall, Pat Hall, Darrel Ince, Hugh Robinson, Helen Sharp, David Shearer
Brief CVs of Key Researchers:
Name: Leonor Barroca
Nationality: Portuguese
Email: l.barroca@open.ac.uk
Home page: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/lmb3/
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Leonor has been a lecturer in the Computing Department since 1994. Her main responsibilities have been to work on software engineering and object technology courses. Prior to this, she was at York University as a researcher in the Dependable Computing Systems Centre (joint project with Newcastle University and British Aerospace), and she was a lecturer at Universidade do Minho, Portugal.
She has an M.Sc. in Computation from Oxford University, and a PhD in computer science from Southampton University. Her research interests are in a variety of areas relating to requirements engineering: frameworks, architectures, components, patterns, real-time systems, safety-critical systems and formal methods. She has an on-going collaboration with the Universidade do Minho, Braga on projects looking at the application of formal methods, and at the documentation of frameworks. She has been invited onto the program committee of the main software engineering conference in Brazil.
Recently, she has co-led workshops at three ECOOP conferences looking at the use of object technology for real-time systems, and is currently preparing a book on the subject. She is also organising a two day seminar on architectural approaches to software engineering (components, frameworks, and patterns) for December 98.
Name: Pat Hall
Nationality: British Email: p.a.v.hall@open.ac.uk
Home page:
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Pat Hall joined the Open University's Computing Department in May 1991 and has established several major research projects: FASGEP, CONTESSE, Glossasoft, PRICES and EuropeMMM (see above), as well as helping others establish projects within the Department. He has published numerous papers and articles over a wide range of software engineering subjects, and he also contributes to courses in software engineering.
Previous to the OU he was at the Department of Computer Science at Brunel University, Uxbridge Middlesex as a Professor since January 1987. There he lectured in software engineering and researched in software reuse and components, testing, and the software development process. His interests include both the technical and the human sides of software development and technology.
Selected Publications:
Armstrong, J., Barroca, L. (1996) 'Specification and Verification of Reactive System Behaviour; the railroad crossing example', Real Time Systems Journal, March.
Barroca, L., Henriques, P., (1998) 'A Framework and patterns for the specification of reactive systems', Information and Software Technology, (to appear).
Barroca, L., McDermid, J. (1994) 'The Role of Formal Methods in Real-Time Computing', Real Time Computing, Halang, W., and Stoyenko, A. (eds), Springer-Verlag.
Coombes, A., Barroca, L., Fitzgerald, J., McDermid, J., Saeed A. and Spencer, L. (1995) 'Formal Specifcation of an Aerospace System: the Attitude Monitor', Applications of Formal Methods, Hinchey, M. and Bowen, J. (eds), Pretice-Hall International Series in Computer Science.
de Lemos, J.G. Hall: Extended RTL in the specification and verification of an Industrial Press. Hybrid Systems III, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (1996).
Hall, P.A.V., Hovenden, F.M., Rachel, J. and Robinson, H.M. (1998) 'Postmodern Software Development', The Computer Journal, (to appear). Hall, P.A.V. and Lingzi Jin (1997) 'The Re-engineering and Reuse of Software', Chapter 12 of Software Engineering, Dorfman and Thayer (eds), IEEE Computer Society, 444-460.
Hall, P.A.V. (1992) 'Domain Analysis' in Integrated Software Development with Reuse, Maiden and Walton (eds), Chapman & Hall. Low, J., Johnson, J., Hall, P.A.V., Hovenden, F.M., Rachel, J., Robinson,
H.M. & Woolgar, S. (1996) 'Read this and change the way you feel about software engineering', Information & Software Technology, 38, 2, February.
Moffett, J., Hall, J.G., Coombes, A. and McDermid, J. (1996) 'A Model for Causal Logic for Requirements Engineering', Journal of Requirements Engineering, vol 1.
Smith, A., Dunckley,L. (1998) Using the LUCID method to optimize the acceptability of shared interfaces.' Interacting with Computers, 9, 3 January pp: 335-344.
Smith, A., Dunckley,L. (1996) 'Towards a Quality Interface - the application of TQM techniques to Interface design.' People & Computers X1. HCI'96. ISBN 3-540-760690-51996. Eds Sasse.M.A., Cunningham R.J. and Winder R.L., pp 3-17.
Contact Details:
Principal Investigator: Dr Leonor Barroca
Address: Computing Department, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
Telephone number: ++44-1908 654864
Telefax number: ++44-1908 652140
EMail: l.barroca@open.ac.uk
List of Members