Topics

• Software Specification and Design generally and Requirements Engineering in particular: Within this context my interests are in eliciting, modelling and analysing requirements from multiple perspectives. Thus I am interested addressing questions such as: how do we gather and organise requirements from multiple stakeholders who might hold multiple viewpoints of a system? How do we describe these viewpoints using multiple representation schemes and multiple process models? How do we analyse different viewpoint descriptions, particularly when these descriptions are inconsistent or conflicting? How do we act in the presence of inconsistencies.

• Inconsistency Management: This area of interest is motivated by, and often a consequence of, supporting multiple viewpoints as described above. Managing inconsistency in software development covers a range of inconsistency handling activities, which begin with inconsistency detection, then progress to analysing of inconsistent descriptions (e.g., specifications), reasoning and acting in the presence of inconsistency and generally living with inconsistency.

• More recently, I have been working in the area of Security Requirements Engineering , and investigating techniques for eliciting, specifiying and analysing security requirements. Security requirements have a number of interesting characteristics: they are negative in the sense that they address events that should not happen, they vary enormously depending on the scope of system being considered, and they are often specified as a consequence of malicious users or intent.

• Process Modelling: Again, in relation to the above research areas, I am interested in understanding, modelling and effectively enacting fine-grain, decentralised and distributed development processes. This facilitates the effective management of software development at the level where it is often most useful - the individual software engineers' level.

• In all of the above areas, I am interested in producing light-weight tools to automate and/or guide development activities. The objective being to populate a Software Engineering Toolbox with tools and heuristics for using them.

• Technology Transfer: A primary focus of my research is applications - the intention being to facilitate effective technology transfer of research results. However, I am also interested in an alternative interpretation of the term "technology transfer" and that is, examining the cross-fertilisation of software engineering and other engineering disciplines such as electronic instrument design and mining. What can we learn from other engineering diciplines and what can we offer them in return...?