Our team has several topics of research. All these topics relate to patterns, program comprehension, and maintenance. Below is a (non-exhaustive!) list of topics of interest. For each topic, we provide a link to a relevant work done in our team. Here is a roadmap of the projects related to the previous research topics. In addition, we work with colleagues to prepare a competition on design pattern identification. If you are interested and would like to participate, please feel free to contact us.

• Binary class relations:
  • Operational descriptions;
  • Modelling and reverse-engineering;
  • UML constituents recovery.
• Code and design smells:
  • Operational descriptions;
  • Automated generation of detection algorithms;
  • Automated generation of suggestions of correction;
  • Automated application of corrections;
  • Evolution and relations with external information.
• Design patterns (structural):
  • Operational descriptions;
  • Automated detection (using explanation-based constraint programming);
  • Automated detection (using efficient bio-informatic algorithms);
• Design patterns (behavioural and creational):
  • Reverse-engineering of sequence diagrams;
  • Operational descriptions;
  • Automated detection (using explanation-based constraint programming).
• Evolution patterns:
  • Co-changing files;
  • Traceability of refactorings and other transformations;
  • Framework-Clients Evolution;
  • Architecture as a kind of DNA.
• Features and requirements:
  • Epidemiological metaphor;
  • Combining experts and rankings.
• Quality models:
  • Quantitative analyses;
  • Empirical (machine learning and visualisation) analyses.
• Understanding program comprehension:
  • Theories of program comprehension with design patterns;
  • Experiments on program comprehension and patterns using eye-trackers;
  • Advanced 3D visualisation techniques.