The Software Technologies Applied Research (STAR) lab is a practice-oriented software engineering research laboratory, located in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Our overall objective is to design and implement new methodologies and tools to develop software systems with a higher quality in a cost-effective manner.
Automated software development is key to improving programmer productivity, product quality, reduced maintenance costs, and enhanced application performance. Our research group investigates ways to realize practical, domain-specific component-based design methodologies for large scale application synthesis.
Research activities at the STAR lab reflect two complementary themes: a scientific approach to understand complex software systems, and an engineering focus on the ability to control, modify, and design such software systems. The research spans the topics of:
- program understanding,
- reverse engineering,
- feature-oriented software designs,
- extensible software systems (software that is easy to extend in order to match the customized needs of application requirements), adaptive software systems (software that reconfigures itself periodically to maximize performance),
- software architectures (building customized applications from components), and
- object-oriented design patterns.
News
Electrical and computer engineering professor, Ladan Tahvildari elected for second term as Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on Software Engineering (TCSE)
Congratulations to electrical and computer engineering professor Ladan Tahvildari, who was recently elected Chair for a second two-year term of the IEEE Computer Society TCSE. She is the first woman, and only the second member from Canada, to chair the organization after holding numerous positions within the IEEE.
ECE professor, Ladan Tahvildari, and research team win 2021 Video of the Year by IBM Canada
Congratulations to electrical and computer engineering professor, Ladan Tahvildari, and her research team!
Professor Ladan Tahvildari elected to lead software engineering body
Published on Waterloo's Daily Bulletin; this piece is based on an article that originally appeared on the Faculty of Engineering's news site.