Researchers in Limerick and Dublin to receive €4m grant

A €4 million Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) grant towards improving the way software is designed, engineered and distributed is to go to researchers at University of Limerick (UL) and Dublin City University (DCU).

Researchers on four separate projects will work in tandem with a range of multinational and indigenous software companies, including IBM, Motorola, Iona Technologies, Intel, and several Irish small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Given the importance of the software industry to the national economy, SFI believes academic and industrial research collaboration in the area of software engineering "is something that is vital for Ireland", according to Dr Richard Hirsh, SFI's senior scientific programme officer in its information and communications technologies division.

The Republic has about 840 software companies, including multinationals and indigenous firms, which account for 8 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

The four projects - which also bring in researchers from other institutions, including the Dundalk Institute of Technology and Trinity College - include code-level work to make software more reliable and more theoretical work on the international social and cultural aspects of software production.

"Our objective is to raise the level at which the Irish software industry develops software - the processes, methods and tools," said UL's Prof Kevin Ryan, who heads one of the project groups.

About €1.3 million will go to DCU, with €2.7 million going to the groups at UL.

Prof Ryan said that an important aspect of the overall project would be "to build networks here of collaboration".

While each of the projects can stand alone, they were funded as an inter-related cluster.

"Ireland's recent prosperity owes much to its international position as a developer of software systems and related services. However, if Ireland is not to lose out to lower-cost countries, it needs to be more inventive, productive and effective in producing software and systems that are of the highest quality. Groups such as this will contribute to this effort," Dr William C. Harris, director general of SFI, said in a statement.

The projects include Multi-Paradigm Programming, led by Prof Joe Morris, DCU, which will focus on ways to streamline and bring together some of the mathematical techniques for reasoning about software design. A key goal for the project will be to deliver techniques that improve the performance of industry-based software engineers working on complex software.

The second project, Software Process for SMEs in a Global Context, is led by Dr Ita Richardson, UL. This project aims to improve software production through better definition and management of the overall software process and its constituent activities. It will focus particularly on small companies, to devise and test models and technologies to improve the development processes of SMEs whose workers may be located globally.

The third project, Agile Approaches for Distributed Development, is led by Prof Brian Fitzgerald, UL. Agile computing is a practice-based theory of software engineering that emphasises innovation and teamwork. Prof Fitzgerald will be looking at applying those concepts to workgroups that are spread globally.

The final project, led by Prof Liam Bannon, UL, is entitled Social and Cultural Aspects of Globally Distributed Software Development. It will investigate the socio-technical factors that support or hinder the development of quality software organisations in geographically distributed software engineering locations.