Research into the industrial application of formal methods has concentrated almost exclusively on the speci cation of software systems in high-risk or safety critical applications Thus, attention has been directed to technical problems with technical systems. In this paper we justify and report early results from a research project which aims to evaluate the implications of using the formal spe...

Risk management for software projects is intended to minimize the chances of unexpected events, or more specifically to keep all possible outcomes under tight management control with making judgments about how risk events are to be treated, valued, compared and combined. It is necessary to have some well-founded infrastructure for the identification of software security risks as well as the app...

We shall touch upon four issues of software engineering (SE): domain engineering, formal techniques, SE sociology, and academic software architects. First, before software can be designed one must understand its requirements; but before requirements can be formulated one must understand the domain. So we assume that requirements development is based on first having established models of the (ap...

In this note, we report on some work in progress on using rewriting logics for discrete event simulation. The idea is to combine the proofs in the logic with the observations in the simulations to gain a better understanding of the interaction intricacies that seem to occur in complex simulations. In particular, we use communication protocols as our application domain, since they have all the i...

Smartcards are trusted personal devices designed to store and process confidential data, and to act as secure tokens for providing access to applications and services. Smartcards are widely deployed and their usage spans over several application domains including banking, telecommunications, and identity. Open platform smartcards are new generation trusted personal devices with increased flexib...

Brunel University currently has four distance learning MSc courses, with over 500 students registered, and one undergraduate distance learning course. Some have been running for over five years, and well-established practices have been developed and provide a basis of support for the university. Quality assurance in the university has always been considered in three, equally important, ways: th...

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