R&D Competences at the

Software Quality

The goal of any IT oriented organization is to increase the quality and cost effectiveness of its IT operations. This practically means the minimization of post-release failures (fixing a defect in a live system often costs much more than fixing it during the development or verification phase). Hence, with the continuously evolving IT systems, improving system maintainability (modifiability, testability, etc.) and continuous quality control are essential.

The mission of the Software Quality Group of the Department is to support the wide spectrum of software quality management (measurement and control) by offering various methodologies, academic and industrial expertise, a strong research commitment towards innovative solutions, services, tools, and trainings.

Our activities are concentrated around and built upon our Software Development Life Cycle Quality Methodology which consists of the following key components:

  • Source code quality assessment
  • Software architecture analysis and reconstruction
  • Software test analysis and improvement
  • Performance analysis
  • Analysis of high level process definitions
  • Life cycle analysis and improvement

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Source code quality

Experiences of IT companies show that the maintenance of complex, multimillion-line software systems consumes very large amounts of resources. Most of these systems have been continuously developed for years (or decades for certain languages like C/C++) and lack up-to-date design documentation describing the actual state of the system. The only valid specification of the system is the source code itself. This situation causes many software maintenance problems, such as:

  • Inaccurate system architecture
  • Implementation problems
  • Test planning difficulties
  • Inaccurate project monitoring

The Columbus technology establishes source code quality assurance solutions by providing the following functionalities:

  • Static and dynamic source code analysis - Source code parsing and instrumentation, fact extraction, building abstract semantic graphs and flow graphs (supported programming languages: C/C++, Java, C#, SQL, PL/SQL and Transact-SQL).
  • Measurement and auditing - Computation of code metrics and checking of coding guidelines and code security/safety problems.
  • Reverse engineering and re-documentation - Architecture and design reconstruction, aiding program understanding, and re-documentation of existing source code.
  • Support for change management - Estimating the cost of software change using sophisticated program analysis techniques.
  • Assessment and optimization of software testing - Finding the problematic parts of the code under testing, assessment of the quality of testing processes using coverage-based measurement, test selection and prioritization.
  • Continuous measurement - Automatic measurement and monitoring of source code on a per-change or regular basis, automatic problem report generation.

Software testing

Based on academic and industrial expertise, we conduct active research and provide R&D, consultancy, and training services to our partners on various aspects of software testing. Our competences include:

  • Code coverage measurement
  • Software change impact analysis
  • Test automation
  • Test management
  • Testability analysis
  • Testware (test environment, test cases, test documentation) quality assessment

We have strong professional relationship with the Hungarian Testing Board, a subsidiary of the international organization ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board).

The Department of Software Engineering is an accredited course provider offering courses in Hungarian and English held by experienced, certified testing professionals according to the CTFL (Certified Tester Foundation Level) ISTQB scheme, which has the following structure:

  • Fundamentals of testing
  • Testing throughout the software life cycle
  • Static techniques
  • Test design techniques
  • Test management
  • Tool support for testing

The courses are also suitable for testers preparing for the official examination.
Further information including details on training schedules and fees is available by contacting Ms. Patrícia Frittman.

Projects

Key industrial partners