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IMDEA Software Research

IMDEA Software aims to advance the science and technology which will allow the cost-effective development of software products with sophisticated functionality and high quality, in terms of safety, reliability, and efficiency. The area has been chosen because of the importance of software as an enabling technology in many devices and services, the significant problems that software failures bring about, and the cost involved in developing high quality software.

The cost-effective development of complex, safe, reliable, and efficient software is not a simple task, and it cannot be solved by simple ``magic bullets'' or more enlightened management. The problem affects all stages in the development lifecyle (see the vertical dimension in the Figure): Analysis, Design and Implementation. IMDEA Software plans to perform research on these aspects along the following dimensions (see the horizontal dimension in the Figure):

• Methodologies: the development and industrial adoption of mathematically rigorous methodologies can improve the software process further.
• Languages: languages are the basis for expressing software functionality, behavior, and properties. Specification, design and programming languages are used to produce cost-effectively high-quality software products and services with sophisticated functionality.
• Verification and Validation: there is a need for powerful, semantically well-founded, tool-supported methods to validate code or designs with respect to specifications.
• Adequacy/Optimization: adequacy means the optimal use of resources to achieve a desired goal.

In addition, two fundamental issues, tools and rigorous foundations (represented as a third dimension in the Figure) pervade the vision:

• Tools: IMDEA Software plan to build well-founded and cost-effective tools (prototypes) that help in the automation of high quality software development. In order to transfer the technological advancements to industry tools are a key ingredient.
• Foundations: these methods and languages should be based on appropriate mathematical foundations, and at the same time be practical, so that they can be applied in the tools mentioned above and thus bring increased levels of automation in the development of high-quality software.