The Software and System Engineering (SSE) department masters methods and tools to assure high quality engineering of software based systems, throughout the whole development lifecycle and with a special focus on SME needs and for safety/security critical systems. This expertise is constantly increased through an active involvement in research at European level and transferred to Walloon enterprises through a number of instruments such a audit, training, coaching and service delivery.
Objectives/Missions
Mastering the complexity of system development is a problem many companies are experiencing. Major reasons are that systems grow ever more complex with an ever growing software part and ever more parties implied in the development process. Adequate methods and tools are necessary to face a number of challenges such as correctly dealing with requirements, developing precise architectures, mastering the test process, managing traceability, especially when dealing with critical aspects such as security or safety. Problems in those area, often combined, result in project overhead and in quality problems.
The objective of the SSE department is to help companies to integrate methods and tools to master better their development process by tackling the above challenges covering the whole development life-cycle. A direct consequence is a reduction in costs, an increase in quality and thus a better competitiveness.
This mission covers specific needs of various kinds of companies. For SMEs, a practical objective is to raise the use of best practices as a first step. For bigger companies or more mature SMEs, more advanced problems could be raised in matters such as modeling, rigorous verification, test production, traceability management, certification.
In order to stay at the edge of expertise, the department has also for objective to contribute actively to applied research at the European level and have interactions with other research and academic partners.
Team
The department is structured in two complementary teams:
The software quality team is devoted to the study of generic aspects of quality both at the process and product levels.
The certisec team is focusing on more specific issues of quality related to security and safety problems which require specific techniques to reach high quality assurance specified in particular certification standards.
Benefits for CETIC
The SSE department groups the methodological and tooling expertise for mastering the quality throughout the whole development lifecycle, both for general quality attributes and specific critical dimensions such as safety and security. This expertise is serving the other applied CETIC departments (software & service engineering, embedded & communicating systems) in order to provide an adequate answer to the needs of the industry which combines CETIC expertise both of the application domain and in software engineering.
