Title: Model-Based Engineering of Complex Software: Challenging the Status-Quo

Abstract:
 Most software systems in the commercial environment are
integrated systems of systems that run on open distributed platforms,
and offer a wide variety of services to end-users. These systems are not
only required to be functionally correct, but they must also be 
highly dependable (i.e., secure, available, fault tolerant, safe, etc.).
The need to address dependability concerns significantly contributes
to the complexity of creating and evolving modern software systems.
Code-centric software development approaches are currently popular
in industrial development environments but they are inadequately 
equipped to cope with the complexity of developing modern software systems.
This realization has led to growing interest in software development
techniques that raise the level of abstraction at which software
is developed. For example, the Object Management Group (OMG), an industry
consortium, is promoting a model-based development approach called
Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), and Bill Gates of Microsoft has recently 
made statements advocating the use of models as front-ends to the coding
activity.

In this talk I will give an overview of the
CSU Software Engineering Group's research in model-based software development.
The objective of the research is to produce development methods
in which the primary artifacts of development are models rather than code.
The talk will give an overview of our research on aspect-oriented modeling
of dependable systems, testing of design models, and on model transformations.
For a description of our research projects visit the website:
http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~france/AOM.html


Bio
Dr. Robert France is currently an Associate Professor in the
Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University.
His research interests are in the area of Software Engineering, in particular
formal specification techniques, rigorous software modeling techniques, 
design patterns, and domain-specific
modeling languages. He is an editor-in-chief of the international journal
on Software and System Modeling (SoSyM), and a steering committee
member of the international conference series on the Unified Modeling
Language (UML). He was a member of the revision task forces for UML 1.4 
and UML 1.5, and he is a founding member of the
precise UML (pUML) group, a group of international researchers working
on developing a formal semantic foundation for the UML.