Focus points for the Object-Oriented Software Systems group

The group focuses on software architecture, pervasive positioning and teaching methodology.

Software Architecture

The group has over the last decade built up research expertise within the area of software architecture. During this period, research within areas such as software configuration management, software reuse, product line architectures, architectural prototyping, and computer supported collaborative work as well as our continued commitment to working on projects in close collaboration with industrial partners, has served as a fertile and sound basis for studying architectural issues.

The group has made contributions within a broad range of architecture-related issues, including frameworks; patterns; reuse; processes; and architecture analysis, design, and development. Research is also conducted in embedded and distributed systems and issues regarding reliability, quality assurance, and object-oriented software safety.

Pervasive Positioning

The OOSS group do research on software system issues of realizing the pervasive computing vision.  The core of this vision is providing information and communication technology everywhere, for everyone, at all times. This vision of future computing ties together much of the group's research, and is a common focus and application area of most projects of the group. A strong focus is on positioning which is the process to obtain the spatial position of a target. In this area we focus on realizing pervasive positioning anywhere, anytime of anything. The group conduct research within areas such as indoor and outdoor positioning, energy efficient positioning, quality-aware positioning, context-awareness, location models and programming paradigmes and software architecture for pervasive computing. Many of these activities are tied to our HTF Galileo project.

The group has made contributions within a broad range of pervasive computing-related issues: evaluations of pervasive computing systems in real use, radio-based positioning systems, energy efficient positioning systems, software architectures, software frameworks and protocols.

Teaching Methodology

Today, introductory and advanced programming courses grounded in the object-oriented prespective are at the core of the curriculum, and the group has naturally been a principal teaching resource in these courses at Aarhus University. The group’s strong commitment to architectural issues, sound object-oriented design principles, and software flexibility and reliability has lead to novel initiatives in our teaching that have resulted in a significant number of contributions published at top international conferences. Work has also been made regarding flexible teaching methods and eLearning.

A current initiative is the development of  a teaching book to be publised by Chapmann Hall/CRC Press whose working title is Flexible, Reliable Software Explained. The book's focus is on practices and techniques for building large scale reliable and flexible software and cover a broad spectrum of techniques ranging from test-driven development, over design patterns, to compositional design and frameworks.