Course Descriptions

Research Methods applicable to Software Engineering: definition of scientific research, scientific research approaches: inductive, conductive and deductive; bibliography and citations, ethical principles in research, qualitative and quantitative methods; action research, analytic research, define and collect appropriate software metrics, introduction to empirical research methods and techniques, and statistical analysis. The course will cover general techniques applicable to any research project, including formulating research questions, theory building, data analysis, building evidence, assessing validity, and publishing.
The course aims to provide students with comprehensive understanding and analysis of research methods and apply these methods through relevant case studies and research investigation in software engineering research questions.

Advanced concepts about software design and software architecture. Design patterns, Architectural structures and styles, Methods for creating and analysing software architecture, interaction between quality attributes and software architecture, software architecture validation and documenting architecture, in depth study of current software architecture research topics such as Services Oriented Architecture (SOA).
The course aims to provide students with comprehensive knowledge of system design and architecture evaluate and apply architecture designs through team project work and research investigation.

This course covers the principles and techniques for Distributed Software Development: outsourcing phenomenon, outsourcing models, global software development models: component-based models, function-based models, implementation-based models; virtual teams factors: team building, resource allocation, human factors-distance, time and cultural differences; globally-distributed projects, Collaborative tools and environments for global software development, Requirements engineering for distributed projects, Process models especially agile methods, Software project management for distributed projects and Assessing coordination risk.
The course aims to provide students with advanced understanding of concepts and methods of distributed team work, analyze and evaluate differences in distributed project configurations, and apply and use collaborative tools through distributed team project work and research investigations, with emphasis on observing distance, time and cultural differences.

Advanced engineering techniques of internet-based applications. It includes an in-depth coverage of topic on internet applications as a domain: users, context, accessibility, business-orientation; characteristics and requirements of internet-based applications: e.g. aesthetics, spontaneity, ubiquity, compatibility, security, scalability, usability, portability, multilingualism, globalism. Also the state-of-the-art coverage of web engineering web applications development process models, web development frameworks; web architectures (cf. web platform architectures, web application architectures), web application modelling: web design models.
The course aims to provide students with advanced and in-depth understanding and analysis of the software engineering methods and techniques of internet-based applications for web design and modeling, and apply these techniques through team project work and research investigation.

An advanced topics on developing secure computer systems. Security services, Security models: determining security requirements; designing secure software architecture; and verifying security requirements. Secure coding principles, practices, and methods including least privilege, threat modelling, and static analysis. Covers common vulnerabilities such as buffer overruns, integer overflows, injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and weak error handling in detail. Hacking techniques and attack types; public and private key encryption; Authentication; Digital signature; User identification and access control. Internet security: security protocols, email and web security; security technologies and tools such as: Firewalls, IDS and IPS.
The course aims to provide students with advanced understanding of the importance of security throughout the software development process, and apply various methods and techniques for vulnerabilities detection through team project work and research investigation.

Introduction to software maintenance, defect management, corrective, adaptive and perfective maintenance. Evolution of legacy software systems. Program comprehension techniques, reverse engineering, restructuring, refactoring of software systems. Software re-engineering, data reverse engineering. Software reuse. Impact analysis, regression testing.
This course aims to provide students with advanced understanding of concepts and techniques of software maintainability, and applied use of configuration management tools and reverse engineering through a team project work and research investigation.

This course covers software design and development of mobile computing. It covers advanced concepts related to engineering methods of mobile applications development including; location aware technologies; mobile web services; and integrated sensors such as touch- and gesture-based UIs. The course covers recent development integrated environments, mobile architectures, operating systems and mobile applications testing approaches.
The course aims to provide students with advanced understanding and analysis of concepts and methods mobile computing, analyze and evaluate user interface design techniques, and apply these techniques through team project work and empirical research exercise.

Selected topics in the field of Software Engineering or Computer Science of interest to both faculty members and students.

The course will cover modeling and representations of the state-of-art knowledge-based systems. The course consists of three modules: (i) Conceptual analyses of applications' business logic using Object Role Modeling, business rules, contradiction and implication between rules, optimization and re-engineering. (ii) Formal specifications languages: description logic, and OWL (iv) Modern knowledge-based applications, including smart data integration and interoperability of networked systems, Digital Libraries design, Semantic-based Web Services, among others.
This course aims to enrich students with theoretical and practical skills in modeling, representation, and management of business rules and building of knowledge-based systems and research investigation in these topics.

The state-of-the-art in project team formulation and conduction practices using modern software engineering development tools. Unified modelling tools, agile development processes and best practices for technical report writing will be covered. The course will encompass the actual running of a substantial team software project, in which students will apply the learned software engineering methods and techniques, and practice their software development skills and tools. The students will apply and experience all the stages of developing a complex software system: feasibility analysis requirements engineering, design, implementation, testing and validation.
The course aims to provide students with advanced applied and analytical skills of software engineering methods and techniques with strong emphasis on team building, communication and leadership through team project work.

Read, analyse and discuss a number of research published in scientific journals in the field of software engineering, presentation and discussion of the principles of scientific integrity and ethics of scientific research, writing a scientific paper in a specific topic chosen by the student include a review of a sufficient number of literature and presented for discussion with the teacher and students of the course and re-drafting of the paper on the basis of discussion and observations.