The Software Engineering Research Unit aims at investigating two strategic areas of software development, for which the available technologies are largely unsatisfactory:

• Requirements engineering
• Code analysis and testing

In the first area, the scientific challenges deal with the explicit representation of autonomic behaviours (e.g., those of self-adaptive systems), of the normative constraints and of the flows. In the area of software testing, the challenge is to automate the generation of the test cases, the detection of faults, their localization in the code and the application of counter-measures.

The Software Engineering Research Unit has organized in Trento three of the major Software Engineering events: ICSM 2012, RE 2011, ISSTA 2010.