About RELEASeD
The RELEASeD research group, headed by Prof. Kim Mens is part of the Département d'Ingénierie Informatique of the Université catholique de Louvain. RELEASeD is the REsearch Laboratory on software Evolution And Software Development Technology, which focusses on a variety of research topics related to programming technology, languages and tool support for software development.
Get directions to the lab
COP Meeting
The main research themes of this research group currently are:
Software Evolution
In this theme, we investigate advanced mechanisms, languages, formalisms, methodologies and tools to support software engineers during maintenance and evolution of a software system. This includes a variety of techniques to:
- detect, discover and verify structural and behavioural regularities in software systems;
- co-design and co-evolve a software system and its structural and behavioural regularities;
- early detect inconsistencies and irregularities in the software upon evolution of that software;
- deal with variability in software development;
- support software restructuring, re-engineering and reverse engineering in general.
Software Development Technology
In this theme, we investigate and advance the state-of-the art in software development technology. We address the problem mainly from a language engineering angle, as a means to study:
- automated transformation and translation of programs written in one language to another language;
- research on advanced program query languages;
- advanced language features for aspect-oriented programming;
- novel programming paradigms and language concepts (for example ambient-oriented programming);
- new program development approaches;
- metaprogramming and reflection;
- generative programming in general.
Aspect Orientation
As one of the most recent emerging software development paradigms, the RELEASeD research group is also interested in technology to support the evolution and development of aspect-oriented software. More specifically, we study, amongst other things:
- advanced language engineering for aspect-oriented programming;
- the use of logic query languages as advanced pointcut languages;
- evolution and maintenance issues with aspect-oriented software;
- aspect mining tools and techniques;
- migration of traditional software towards aspects;
- alternative techniques to deal with crosscutting concerns in software.
Ambient Software
Finally, with its research on the Ambience programming language and Ambient Object System (AmOS), the RELEASeD research group is also studying:
- the conception of language abstractions to program ambient-oriented software;
- the development of ambient software systems (methodology and tools).